A promise to the poor

The Challenge

Ravi Narayanan, WaterAid Director.

Although the intimate connection between water and the development of civilization is well known, it is only recently that the importance of water and sanitation to the health and wellbeing of billions of people in the developing countries has been recognized. Unsafe drinking water and a lack of sanitation have horrific impacts: 6,000 children die every day due to diarrhoeal disease and millions of families worldwide are trapped in poverty as women have to spend their days collecting water rather than working.

These facts have led to the universal adoption, by the states of the United Nations, of the Millennium Developing Goals, which aim to halve the proportion of poor people without safe water and sanitation by 2015. Currently over a billion people live without safe water and over two billion lack sanitation, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

For WaterAid, which has helped to bring the benefits of safe water to over 7.5 million, the scale of the task can appear daunting. However, the task is the responsibility of many stakeholders: governments in developing countries, donors, civil society, non-governmental organizations, community groups and the private sector (especially the seldom mentioned domestic private sector).

For governments in the developing countries, the recent recognition by the UN of water as a human right should raise the priority placed in the provision of safe water and sanitation in their national development plans. For donors and multilateral institutions, an increase in the quality and quantity of their assistance to both water and sanitation projects, and particularly strategies, is long overdue.

NGOs should continue to promote the interest of the poor and vulnerable people, develop innovative solutions based on appropriate technologies and support mobilization of financial resources and decision making within the poor communities. But the real challenge for NGOs like WaterAid will be the scaling up of relatively isolated water and sanitation projects to district, provincial and national levels. This will require a clear understanding of the local and national context, the complexities of various policy making processes and the ability to forge positive relationships with key decision makers, especially governments. Solutions will have to be developed on a case by case basis so as to be appropriate for specific communities, and therefore sustainable.

WaterAid hopes to be counted amongst those NGOs that can built on the real but limited impact of successful field projects to a larger scale, and thus make a significant contribution to the task of bringing safe water and sanitation to the many millions of people throughout the world who currently lack them.