Water and Sanitation
Speech
Gareth Thomas, International Development Minister at the Water Forum
18 March 2008
Thanks very much, and thank you all for setting up and taking part in our Water Forum. World Water Day is an important day in the development calendar. And frankly I think it’s a day that needs to become even more important in the years that remain for us to try to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. I think it’s also a particular opportunity for us to look at what further action we need to take as an international community increase access water and sanitation in the developing countries.
And it’s also a chance to talk about how the world can better share scarce water in the context of rising population growth and the challenge of climate change. That particular issue I think is becoming ever more important.
First a little bit of context. Water and sanitation is without doubt a defining feature of poverty. Women and children toiling to collect water for their families. The insanitary living conditions of so many people - all because they lack something as basic as a toilet – are I think genuinely shocking.
The fact too that, at any given time half the developing world is sick from a water related illness – and half the hospital beds are taken up with patients with water related diseases. And the fact that that adds up to lives of drudgery, indignity and missed opportunity. And this in the 21st century in a world of unprecedented wealth, is truly shocking.
So progress simply isn’t fast enough. We’re at a critical stage with the Millennium Development Goals with very limited time in order to get those targets met.
That is why the Prime Minister talks of an MDG ‘emergency’ and made 2008 a year of action on the MDGs with the UN Secretary General seeking to build to a climax with an event at the UN General Assembly on the 25 September.
We know that to reach the MDGs we need to get water to 300,000 extra people each day and sanitation to 450,000 people each day. The water target is barely on track. And as many of you will know, the sanitation target is way behind the progress that we need – indeed at current rates of progress it won’t be met in sub Saharan Africa until 2075. That surely again unacceptable in the 21st century.
So all of us – donors, partner governments, civil society, private sector – need to do more if we’re to meet the challenge of meeting the water target, and achieving the sanitation challenge too.
Water is a scarce and vital resource. We need to share it more fairly, we need to manage it better. In so doing, to help people to get the water they need to live, to support their livelihoods and to see the type of economic growth that is fundamental to achieving all of the MDGs not just the water and sanitation targets.
Take Ethiopia, for example. If Ethiopia managed its water resources better its GDP growth would be 50% greater than it is at the moment. Similarly, in Ethiopia, climate change, and population growth are making it even more important for Ethiopia to store and manage its water well..
So what do we do? Three years ago Hilary Benn, the then Secretary of State for International Development, set out the Department’s plans to do more on water. He committed us to doubling our expenditure in Africa by the end of this financial year. We are on track to meet this commitment and we will do even more in coming years.
Three years from now we will be spending £200 million every year on water and sanitation in Africa, having doubled again our expenditure on water.
We have already started to ratchet up our efforts.
In Ethiopia, a £75 million 5-year programme will help the government to deliver water and sanitation to over 3 million people in some 7,000 rural communities and 37 small towns.
In Sierra Leone a 5-year £32 million programme will make sure that 1.5 million people - a third of Sierra Leone’s population - are healthier through better water, sanitation and improved hygiene. But our efforts are not limited to Africa.
The
new Water Action Plan Update, ‘Meeting our promises’
(1,736
kb) that we are publishing
today, describes progress country by country and the difference we are making to
the lives of poor people through our work in water and sanitation across the
globe.
So in Bangladesh we’ve helped over 1 million people gain access to improved sanitation and nearly 400,000 to safe water.
In Nigeria we provided latrines in schools for 40,000 pupils and improved water supply to some 650,000 people.
Tanzania gives water a high priority. And our budget support means that it makes more funds available to deliver basic water and sanitation services.
Our new policy will set out how DFID will play its part in meeting the challenges the world faces in water and sanitation as we head to the 2015 end point for the MDGs.
I’d like to put on record my thanks and appreciation to all of you who have helped with the preparation of the policy and look forward to its launch that document in a few weeks’ time.
To give you some sense of the direction of that document, I think there are four things that DFID needs to focus on in the calendar months and years.
Firstly I think we need to look at how we can transform the international system better to help us deliver more access to water and sanitation.
Secondly we need to take advantage of the International Year of Sanitation that we’re in at the moment.
Thirdly, I think we need to do more around the issue of water resources and the link with climate change and conflict.
And fourthly I think we need to look more at the issue of financing for Water Supply and Sanitation
Let me take these in order.
- Firstly we need to transform the international system - so that global attention really does lead to real action at an national level. We’re funding UN Water to produce the first ever annual global monitoring report this summer. That will be discussed at the first high-level meeting in September, to agree actions to reach the MDG targets.
We need to link the international system then to national actions at the ground level, getting the UN system and the International Financial Institutions to work ever more closely behind governments’ own priorities in this area.
We ourselves will support at least five country governments to prepare and implement their own national plans for water and sanitation. Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Mozambique and Bangladesh, but others potentially too.
- Secondly we will seek to use the International Year of Sanitation to give a real focus on this most off-track MDG;
We’re already providing sanitation in schools for millions of children in Nigeria, in Malawi, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and India. And we are working up major sanitation programmes in a number of other countries as well.
The sad truth is that, and I’m sure some of you will recognise this truth. Sanitation has too often been forgotten in development. So we will provide £1.5 million to a new Global Sanitation Fund that’s being set up, over the next three years. That will help raise awareness and promote sanitation and hygiene to help increased access for millions more people. And Jon Lane, the Executive Director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, is here today and he will tell you more later about how that new fund will operate.
- Thirdly on shared water. We need to use water to bring people and countries together and to better discuss how they can share this often scarce resource.
The world’s record does suggest that there has been more co-operation to date than dispute over shared water. But I think that trend will come under increasing pressure as the competition for water to support growth and meet the needs of growing populations becomes ever more intense in years to come. I think that will come under greater pressure as for example, we know that climate change will have profound effects on water, bringing more droughts, bringing more floods in its wake.
Douglas Alexander in a recent speech said that climate change would define international development for years to come.
Nick Stern in his seminal report said that the impact of ‘climate change will be felt through changes in the distribution of water around the world and its seasonal and annual variability’. So water is then right at the centre of climate change.
We will therefore increase our efforts to help in the better management of water resources. We will pay particular attention to climate change and the potential for increased tensions over water.
And I am therefore pleased to announce today that I can announce an additional £8 million to the Nile Basin Initiative which will more than double our support taking it to £14 million in total.
And I am also pleased to be able to announce that we will provide half a million pounds to the South Asia Water Initiative to promote greater co-operation in the countries in the Himalayan region. We believe that could begin the process of improving relations between countries in what is one of the world’s most volatile regions - home too to many of the poorest people in the world at the moment. And where conditions are likely to become ever more challenging given the rate at which the Himalayan Mountains are melting as a result of climate change.
- Fourthly the issue of financing for Water and Sanitation. We know that more funding is very much needed – we also know that donor money on its own will not be enough, even if others follow our lead and increase their commitments.
So we need to look at other ways to get more funds flowing into the water and sanitation sector. The international private sector won’t fill that gap. But there are other possibilities – the local private sector does have a part to play in getting services to the poor, and in a number of countries we are already working with the local private sector.
We need to run with what works to get the finance to those who can help genuinely deliver water and sanitation to poor people.
So, we do plan to hold a Water and Sanitation Financing Conference later in the year. It will highlight the financial mechanisms that have been successful in bringing in more funds such as for example, output based aid; government and civil society partnerships; how the local private sector is being effectively utilised and indeed too, the EU water Facility. It will explore the possibilities of revitalising the Evian Action Plan for Water - that we and other G8 members are calling for.
Now, to tackle those four major challenges we need to build strong and effective partnerships – and I hope that you will all recognise that that implicitly recognises the huge potential for your work alongside us too.
There is a genuine value of your ideas. We need your insights about the realities on the ground, about the realities of how particular institutions have worked, about the way we should put our energy, our effort and indeed our enthusiasm – and I hope you’ll forgive us if we seek to challenge you on occasion, I have no doubt that you’ll challenge us. on occasion too.
Genuinely, I welcome your thoughts and your suggestions – and I hope both the rest of today, and indeed beyond today, you’ll continue to work with us very closely.
Thank you.
