|
Kyoto World Water Forum:
Water and Sanitation for All
Koneru Vijaya Lakshmi
kvl@sdalt.ernet.in
W ater
is such a unique vital resource in our lives that it calls for
greater attention from humankind worldwide. It touches upon all
facets of our lives in many ways including social, economic,
environmental, cultural and spiritual well being. The issues of
concern vary from sufficiency, efficiency, quality, equity to micro
and macro economic linkages besides local, regional, national,
transnational and a plethora of other issues. Spreading deserts,
changing climates, shrinking river basins, depleting biodiversity
and flourishing water borne diseases are some of the causes of our
concern over this precious resource.
In order to assess the progress in addressing
these concerns and to take stock of emerging opportunities, the
World Water Forum (the 3rd in the series) was held in the three
neighbouring Japanese cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Shiga from 16th to
23rd March this year. While the 1st and the 2nd World Water Forums
concentrated on issue identification, prioritization and commitments
respectively, the 3rd forum was anticipated to be a forum for
sharing of action taken on the ground and therefore had attracted as
many as 24,000 delegates from 182 countries with divergent
backgrounds. Equally divergent are the 38 interrelated themes that
were debated during the 351 separate sessions. The key theme was:
How to ensure safe water and sanitation for the entire world.
The forum brought together water suppliers and
users (especially farmers’ and women’s networks from developing
countries), national and international NGOs, Government officials,
policy makers, politicians, technical experts, a host of
consultants, human rights specialists, anti-globalization promoters,
consumer rights specialists, besides national and international
development aid agencies and investors.
More than 100 new commitments have been made
by the participants, of which more than 20 are on climate change and
about ten of them are about gender issues. Though the Kyoto water
forum was criticized for "all talk and no action", several parallel
sessions provided evidence of action that could improve or manage
the water resources with complementary approaches. On the contrary,
the 29 point ministerial declaration was described as a usual
rhetoric with watered down statements. It failed to capture the
successful actions and translate them into stronger policy
recommendations.
Meeting the Millennium Development Goals
As per the report of the Joint Monitoring
Program (JMP) launched since 1990 by a consortium of UN agencies,
some 2.4 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation and 1.1
billion people lack access to safe drinking water.
The political commitments on water supply and
sanitation stated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the
World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) Action Plans aim to
halve these numbers by 2015. It was also pointed that the current
level of expenditure in water and sanitation sector is quite tiny in
the global economy as the average turnover amounts to less than 0.6%
GDP and investments are less than 0.1%.
The above survey brought home two facts:
Increased Financial Flows
The current levels of investments on water
structures have to be considerably increased to meet the MDGs by
2015. As per the Camdessus Report (named after Camdessus – the
former head of IMF) on financing water infrastructure, it is
estimated that an additional amount of US$ 100 Billion per annum is
required by the world to meet the MDGs.
Financing Options
The increased investments will have to come
from somewhere - either from different governments or aid agencies.
While there was a consensus on the first point
i.e., increase in financial flows, the issue was further debated in
terms of what kind of monitoring and evaluation systems were needed
and what kind of cost effective indicators could be used for
effective monitoring.
Coming to the second point regarding the
financing options, the Camedssus Report suggests that the increased
investments could come from financial markets, water authorities
themselves through tariffs, Multilateral Financial Institutions,
Governments or public development aid, preferably in the form of
grants. The same report also emphasizes that the ODA and
Multilateral Financial Institutional lending should be extended to
private operators. However, the forum participants were greatly
divided on this issue without coming to any consensus. The activists
raised objections by stating that water is for life and not for
profits. A number of other groups started exploring some middle path
for public-private partnerships, with greater control over the
resource and equitable distribution of water to ensure that the
interests of the poor are served.
Other Key Issues
The forum emphasized the need for balancing
the competing uses of water in terms of water for drinking, improved
health and sanitation, sufficient food production, industrial
agriculture, transportation, energy and other environmental needs.
To address such cross cutting issues,
integrated water resource management approaches, effective
governance, improved capacity, adequate financing and regional
conflict resolution were seen as key solutions. Several partnerships
and networks were launched and commitments were made by the forum to
promote such solutions.
Whatever be it, the forum has
certainly raised awareness and inspired the participants to take
initiatives that could safeguard this precious resource.
q
|
Highlights of Commitments on MDG Monitoring |
|
l |
The Water
and Sanitation Program (World Bank) is already committed
to funding national capacity building projects for MDG
monitoring. Candidate countries are welcomed to apply. |
|
l |
The European
Commission is committed through EUREAU to including
benchmarking into the EU Water Initiative |
|
l |
The World
Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) will
be presenting "WASH" awards for the best examples of
reporting on hygiene, sanitation and water issues. |
|
l |
The World
Water Council (WWC) commits itself to providing
permanent inter-linkage of monitoring networks. |
|
l |
The Seine
Normandy Water Agency will temporarily act as a driving
force for the partnerships developed within this
session. |
|
|
Evaluating and monitoring the
Access to
Water Supply and Sanitation (WS&S) |
|
Lack of systematic monitoring and
evaluation framework to assess the status of water
supply and sanitation sector was often used as an excuse
for inaction and even to agree upon the figures on
coverage that are being derived in order to plan for
future.
These issues were discussed as
part of the Water and Poverty theme sessions, for
which the author had the opportunity to provide
recommendations on effective tools for WS&S monitoring,
based on the experiences of some national level programs
currently ongoing in India. |
| |
The
author in her presentation recommended the
following: |
| |
|
l |
Promote
community involvement in monitoring of WS&S at all
stages of a project cycle; |
|
l |
Investments have to be made for capacity building
and institutional strengthening of user groups,
local support organizations |
|
l |
Investments also need to be allocated for
information collection, processing and dissemination
at various levels; |
|
l |
Conflict
resolution among competing water users for greater
sustainability of the existing and future WS&S
management systems. |
|
l |
Employ
WS&S (water supply and sanitation) management
systems and performance benchmarking at district
level |
|
l |
Future
reporting protocol of WS&S coverage should
incorporate per formance indicators gathered at
various levels: |
|
|
|
l |
Local level
Degree of decentralization achieved in project
cycle management and in community based
monitoring, assessment and reporting systems at
local level |
|
l |
State
level
Expenditure incurred in capacity building and
institutionalization processes against overall
performance improvements; State level aggregated
data as per the pre-determined format |
|
l |
National
level
Aggregation of data to provide comparative
figures of each state; Summary status reports
(annually for each country pointing future
strategy in achieving the set goals). |
|
|
|
|
Session Recommendations |
|
l |
Simple and
understandable indicators should be used in order to
inform decision makers and raise awareness of the general
public; the media having an essential role to play. |
|
l |
The national
decision makers should endorse the MDG targets already set
up in the 2000 global drinking water and sanitation
evaluation report (UNICEF/WHO/WSSCC). Furthermore local
authorities should commit themselves both to defining the
level of services and to planning and monitoring the
implementation of MDG on their respective areas and in
particular in the ones most badly provisioned. |
|
l |
New
partnerships should be set up to group together all active
stakeholders in order to develop, operate and finance: |
| |
|
l |
A
transparent, independent and decentralised
assessment system, relying on a participatory
approach prioritizing women and local stakeholders. It
should include a limited number of relevant indicators
including quality, sustainability of the supply and
equity of the distribution. Yearly population censuses
on the access to drinking water, sanitation and
hygiene should provide the basic information on the
ground. These data should be aggregated at a national
level so as to ensure that they can be compared and be
used as a MDG benchmarking instrument and to validate
official assessments. |
|
l |
A
network of information focusing on the investments
really carried out as regards water supply and
sanitation and on the human and economic benefits of
these services to provide guidance and motivation to
decision makers and their voters. |
|
|
These two
systems could be managed by a network composed of regional
observatories with UN and international organisations
legitimacy, but relying directly on the civil society and
basic skills – local authorities, NGOs, water
professionals. |
|
Back to Contents
|