Irony of the poor paying more for water

In what can be billed as the harshest of all ironies, poor people across the globe pay much more for clean water than their rich neighbours. This is according to the UNDP Human Development Report 2006 launched last week in Cape Town, South Africa. The launch comes at a time when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is underway in Nairobi, Kenya. Titled Beyond scarcity: Power, politics and the global water crisis, the report notes that in the slums of Nairobi the poor pay five to 10 times more per litre of water than their wealthy counterparts.

“While the rich usually get water from a single supplier, the poor have to reckon with a bewildering array of service providers, such as public standpipes, vendors, truckers, and water carriers. Some of the water vendors access water from the municipal source and then re-sell it at a premium to poor slum dwellers who do not have access to piped water. As a result, water delivered through a vendor is often 10 to 20 times more costly than water provided by the public utility”, the report says.

According to the report, a major disparity in water and sanitation is between urban and rural areas, partially because incomes tend to be lower in rural areas, but also because delivering services is more difficult and often more costly per capita for dispersed rural populations than for urban populations. Political factors also come into play, with people in rural areas—especially marginal areas—typically having a far weaker voice than their urban counterparts. ‘Not having access to clean water’ is a euphemism for profound deprivation. It means that people walk more than one kilometre to the nearest source of clean water for drinking, that they collect water from drains, ditches or streams that might be infected with pathogens and bacteria that can cause severe illness and death.”

Water and sanitation suffer from chronic under-funding. Public spending is typically less than 0.5 percent of GDP. According to the report, this figure is dwarfed by military spending: In Ethiopia, for instance, the military budget is 10 times the water and sanitation budget. Still, water and sanitation is not a donor-country priority, either, says the report, with only five percent of Overseas Development Assistance spent on this sector. According to the report, a doubling of aid flows—an extra US$3.4 billion to $4 billion annually—is necessary to have any chance of reaching the MDG on water and sanitation.

Across much of the developing world, unclean water is an immeasurably greater threat to human security than violent conflict. Yet unlike wars and natural disasters, this global crisis does not galvanise concerted international attention. “Like hunger, it is a silent emergency experienced by the poor and tolerated by those with the resources, the technology and the political power to end it,” says the report. With less than a decade left to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, this needs to change, the report says.

One-third of all people without access to water fall below the $1-a-day absolute poverty threshold. Another third live on no more than $2 a day. In sanitation, the poorest two-fifths of households in the world account for more than half the global deficit, according to the report.

The poor need ‘water for life’—for drinking, cooking and washing—as well as water to grow food and earn a living, says the report. Yet poor farmers face a potentially catastrophic water crisis from the combination of climate change and competition for scarce water resources. The great majority of the world’s malnourished people—estimated now at 830 million—are small farmers, herders, and farm labourers. Climate change threatens to intensify their water insecurity on an unparalleled scale, with parts of sub-Saharan Africa facing crop losses of up to 25 percent. At the same time, competition over water to produce food is escalating at an alarming rate in developing countries, with political and economic power, not concern for poverty, acting as the driving force. “The biggest challenge ahead is how to manage water resources faced with competition and climate change to meet rising food needs while protecting the access of poor and vulnerable people,”

Shoring up the rights of the rural poor, increasing their access to irrigation and new technology and helping them adapt to inevitable climate change will be imperative to ward off disaster, contends the report. Faced with these challenges, there is need for increasing cooperation across national borders to ensure water security for the poor is more tangible than ever, as by 2025, over three billion people could be living in countries under water stress.

Rising industrial demand, urbanization, population growth and pollution are placing unprecedented stress on water systems—and on agriculture. As competition intensifies, social conflict over water is likely to increase. The danger is that those with the weakest rights—small farmers and women producers in particular—will lose out.

Even with an agreement to mitigate carbon emissions through international cooperation, dangerous climate change is now almost inevitable, and the most severe consequences will be experienced by countries and people who bear no responsibility for the problem. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa are facing crop losses of up to 25 percent from climate-change induced weather patterns.

Efforts thus far to help the poor to adapt to climate change have been ‘spectacularly inadequate,’ says the report. As dry areas get drier, wet areas get wetter and extreme weather becomes more common, the poor—who are usually most exposed to the elements and most directly dependent on the natural world for resources—will become more vulnerable to hunger, poverty and environmental degradation. Inequality will intensify. Agriculture will be the hardest hit. In some regions, changing rainfall patterns and declining water availability will reduce yields by a quarter or more by 2050.

But suffering for lack of water isn’t just a problem for future generations. Today in northeast Kenya, three million people risk starvation from drought. Entire pastoral communities have seen their herds and assets depleted, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to all future risks. Violent clashes between farmers and pastoralists over water have become increasingly common, while Kenya’s GDP fell 16 percent between 1998 and 2000 due to drought.

Sadly, the report stresses that the longstanding public-versus-private debate on water will not bring prices down. In recent years, public debate on water-delivery policy in developing countries has been dominated by a polarizing discussion on privatization versus public ownership. But the report argues that this is a false choice, diverting attention from the ultimate goal of finding viable ways of getting potable water to those who can least afford to pay.

“The debate over the relative merits of public and private-sector performance has been
a distraction from the inadequate performance of both public and private water providers in overcoming the global water deficit,” says the report. It adds: “A new, more strategic approach that puts the poor at the centre of the solution is essential to reach the Millennium Development Goals by 2015”.

The way forward is for governments to put water at the center of poverty reduction strategies and budget planning. Accordingly, all governments should go beyond vague constitutional principles in enabling legislation to ensure the human right to a secure, accessible and affordable supply of water. At a minimum, this implies a target of at least 20 litres of clean water a day for every citizen—and at no cost for those too poor to pay.

There is also need for expansion on pro-poor investment. According to the report, water is underfinanced, with the largest financing gaps being found in rural areas and in urban slum settlements. Closing these gaps requires increased financing and a reorientation of public spending to rural communities, through the provision of wells and boreholes, and to urban
slum areas, through the provision of standpipes.

The report also recommends a review of water tariffs and subsidies. It says subsidies can play a critical role in delivering affordable water to the poor, but too often, they instead deliver windfalls to the non-poor, while impoverished households using public taps face the highest prices. The rural sector also needs to be prioritized. Building on successful demand-responsive approaches, governments need to make service providers more responsive and accountable to the communities that they serve. “Decentralization of water governance can play an important role, provided that decentralized bodies have the technical and financial capacity to deliver services”, says the report.

According to the report, a Global Action Plan under G8 leadership is urgently needed to resolve a growing water and sanitation crisis that causes nearly two million child deaths every year. Each year, the report notes, 1.8 million children die from diarrhoea that could be prevented with access to clean water and a toilet; 443 million school days are lost to water-related illnesses; and almost 50 percent of all people in developing countries are suffering at any given time from a health problem caused by a lack of water and sanitation. To add to these human costs, the crisis in water and sanitation holds back economic growth, with sub-Saharan Africa losing five percent of GDP annually—far more than the region receives in aid.