Water for people.pdf - WHO Thailand Digital Repository

6 / S E T T I N G T H E S C E N EThe World’s Water CrisisHuman beings are at the centre of concerns forsustainable development. They are entitled to a healthyand productive life in harmony with nature.It is clear that water is integral to sustainable development, and isrelated in some way to each of the five theme areas elaborated atthe World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) inJohannesburg, August/September 2002. These include water andsanitation, energy, health, agriculture and biodiversity. Furthermore,as discussed below, water is relevant to all three strands ofdevelopment – social, economic and environmental.Health, hygiene and social developmentWater is most obviously related to the issue of social developmentthrough its impacts on health. Without safe drinking water, humans– not to mention animals and plant life – cannot survive. Waterrelateddiseases are amongst the most common causes of illnessand death, and the majority of people affected by them live indeveloping countries. Good sanitation facilities and hygienicpractices can significantly reduce diarrhoeal and infectious diseasesand prevent worm infections. Water for washing prevents scabiesand trachoma. One important aspect of water quality is theavoidance of changes in its chemical composition. Water resourcemanagement also has an impact on malarial infection rates bypreventing mosquito breeding grounds. Furthermore, since adequatewater resources are essential for food production, they have animpact on people’s health through the prevention of malnutrition,thus enabling people to more readily recover from illness and leadhealthier lives.Improved sanitation facilities can impact remarkably on people’slives, in terms of safety, privacy, convenience and dignity, especiallywith regard to the lives of women. In fact, the provision of waterschemes often has a greater impact on the lives of women as inmost societies the responsibility for domestic water and sanitation istheirs. However, most decisions affecting communities are taken bymen. Well-planned water and sanitation schemes have been shownto be a good way of breaking this gender demarcation, allowingwomen to exercise authority within a community and empoweringthem to make decisions affecting the community and beyond. Therehas been a trend in recent years towards local management ofwater supply schemes and water resources. This is empoweringcommunities to work together for the betterment of their societies.Water is often an initial starting point for community initiatives,as the essential nature of the issues means they are widelyunderstood. Many communities, once empowered in this way,continue to work together on subsequent initiatives. Sanitation isalso a good starting point for addressing long-term poverty issuesin a community. Often this can be done by focusing on children asthey are the ones to suffer most immediately from ill-health and areprimary agents of change, increasing the pace at which necessarybehavioural changes are adopted by communities.Water and poverty reductionMuch of sustainable development is focused on getting people outof poverty. People privileged enough to live in more prosperous partsof the world, along with the better-off in many developing countries,rarely have to confront the consequences of water scarcity. For manyof the world’s poor however, the story is very different. Inadequateaccess to water forms a central part of people’s poverty, affectingtheir basic needs, health, food security and basic livelihoods.Improving the access of poor people to water has the potential tomake a major contribution towards poverty eradication.Poverty is no longer seen as a simple lack of income or, at thenational level, low per capita Gross National Product (GNP). It istoday recognized to be a complex, multifaceted situation thatinvolves both the material and non-material conditions of life. Manyinternational organizations have put forward new approaches topoverty reduction in recent years, which have important implicationsfor the development of all aspects of life, including key areas ofnatural resource management such as water. These approaches areleading to a rethinking of many water policies and laws, with theemphasis on new institutional and management frameworks thatmore explicitly target the needs and opportunities of poor people.One of the earliest new approaches springs from the United NationsDevelopment Programme’s (UNDP) ‘Human Poverty Index’introduced in the 1997 Human Development Report, which viewspoverty in terms of a lack of basic human capabilities. The indexconsists of five key indicators: literacy, life expectancy, access tosafe water, availability of health services and the proportion ofunderweight children aged five and under. Income poverty is alsorecognized, with extreme poverty defined as the lack of incomeneeded to satisfy basic food needs, and overall poverty as the lackof income needed to satisfy a range of basic needs including food,shelter, energy and others.The World Bank initiated a broad electronic debate on themeaning of poverty through their web site, which gave fruit to the2000 World Development Report. Key elements of poverty aregiven, such as the inability to satisfy basic needs, lack of controlover resources, lack of education and skills, poor health,malnutrition, lack of shelter and lack of access to water supply andsanitation, vulnerability to shocks and a lack of political freedomand voice. As self-evident as the statement that ‘poverty is asituation people want to escape’ may seem, it reflects theimportant and often underestimated point that poverty is dynamicand people move into and out of poverty as the conditions of theirlives change. This approach is reflected in the World Bank/