Drinking Water Supply in Developing Countries

Background

It was at the Mar del Plata Water Conference in 1977 that the poor state of the global drinking water supply situation in developing countries was first exposed and discussed. A major result was that the 1980s were denominated as the International Drinking Water Supply Decade.

Impressive international resources were mobilized during the decade, but the results were rather disappointing. The interventions had been poorly targeted and, far too often, the provided infrastructure turned out to be unsustainable. The lessons from the decade were distilled at a meeting in New Delhi in 1990.

Most of these lessons were picked up at the Environmental Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and this conference also highlighted the importance of safe water supply for sustainable development. The outcomes of the summit were condensed in Agenda 21—a recommendation about the crucial issues that must be dealt with during the 21st century.

As enthusiasm from Rio tended to wane towards the end of the millennium, the UN General Assembly stressed the importance of Agenda 21 and endorsed it in its Millennium Declaration. Unfortunately, the declaration was made strictly instrumental and promoted in terms of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which contained a score of goals and even more targets. Still, they did not contain any water goals.

The problems with the MDGs were highlighted at the Rio+10 Conference in Johannesburg, where delegates found the MDGs much too unfocused as they did not state any priorities. Therefore, the delegates decided to express priorities among the MDGs. The outcome was the WEHAB agenda, with an action plan for each of these issues. The letter W stands for the top priority issue that was drinking water supply and sanitation. The immediate result was that the MDGs were revised so that both water and sanitation got both mention and targets—a halving of the number of unserviced individuals until 2015.

In 2015, the MDGs were succeeded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), with 2030 as their target year. Here, the goals for drinking water supply were sharpened to a full coverage of safe drinking water services. Concerning sanitation, the goal is a full coverage of improved sanitation systems.

Obviously, the SDGs represents a major challenge for the water sector. Until now, drinking water supply has been much of a numbers game. It was essentially a matter of the number of new connections. Now, the war cry is “No-one Left Behind”, which requires attention on urban slums and peri-urban areas, environments that tend to be quite unfamiliar to mainstream water engineers. The requirement of safe water supply implies needs for improved monitoring and, preferably, non-interrupted water supply.

The challenge

Even if drinking water supply has been high on the international development agenda since the Mar del Plata conference, the results on the ground have been very disappointing. There are several factors that have contributed to this poor result. One is the failure to realize that drinking water supply is an issue of a multidisciplinary nature. As a result, the problem has been seen as something it was up to the water engineers to fix. A related issue is that water engineers have been very conservative and, thus, unwilling to rethink their practices. Another issue is that they have been perplexed by the scale of the problem and have jumped head-on into large-scale deployment of their favorite technologies. Obviously, they have not paid attention to the age-old Chinese wisdom that even a thousand-mile march starts with one step. The sector has also suffered from a privatization trend strongly supported by the World Bank and its allies.

To a large extent, the institutional setups have been inadequate and retained their top–down structures in spite of the calls from New Delhi through Rio and Johannesburg concerning the needed devolution to local institutions. Obviously, the mainstream frameworks in the sector seem woefully inadequate. It is essential to focus on the common good rather than private profit. Some for all rather than more to some must be the new motto. In such a framework, investment in drinking water and sanitation produces benefits valued at more than five dollars for each dollar invested. It does also become much more sensible to follow Robert Chambers’s dictum of putting the last first, and to stress the need for the professionals concerned to be critically self-aware. Water is also a vital component of the livelihoods of people, which should remind us of the many-faceted importance of a safe and reliable water supply services.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to present examples of existing projects that have tried different ideas to avoid the mainstream mistakes and embarked on drinking water provision in the spirit of Agenda 21 and its subsequent endorsements.

We therefore invite submissions that deal with one or more of the following issues that all tend to be important for a much-needed revision of the frameworks currently underlying drinking water supply:

• How to shape interventions to become acceptable, affordable, and adapted to the local context;
• How to build on local skills and resources;
• How to empower the target group(s) and create trust;
• How to facilitate a good synergy between water supply, sanitation, WASH efforts, and public health;
• How to develop a viable local organization to serve as lead agency—resourcing, capacity building, fostering an adequate organizational culture;
• How to effectively monitor the ongoing water supply;
• How to develop evaluation procedures that promote transparency and ongoing learning;
• How to start small and successively learn from experience to eventually create a snowballing effect;
• What are the major requirements for making the drinking water supply sustainable and an effective contribution to sustainable development?

Prof. Dr. Peder Hjorth
Guest Editor

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