Summary
Without concerted global action, the world risks missing not just the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets to halve the number of people without access to sanitation and water, but all eight Goals.[1] Sanitation and water sit at the heart of development. Proper sanitation and water provision vastly reduces global disease and brings children, especially girls, into school; women are released from the wretched daily burden of fetching water; and the supply of food increases with adequate irrigation
Almost one in two people in the developing world lacks access to sanitation. Sanitation gets far less attention than water in DFID's policies and this imbalance needs urgent correction. On current trends the MDG target will not be met until 2076. This is a hidden international scandal that is killing millions of children every year. DFID should become a global champion for sanitation. New approaches and new staffing configurations are needed to tackle the entrenched stigma and poor understanding that keep demand for sanitation low and disease levels high.
DFID has now refocused on sanitation and water after diverting its attention in recent years. It has doubled its aid to Africa for this purpose, and will double it again to £200 million a year by 2010-11. The Department has recognised that money alone will not provide toilets and taps—nor drive demand, create political will, strengthen capacity or institute behaviour change—and has proposed a Global Action Plan to put the structures in place to ensure aid for sanitation and water is spent as effectively as it can be. It is imperative that DFID secures urgent international agreement to the Plan.
Realising their right to water currently remains outside the reach of over one billion people, including half of all Africans. There are as many solutions to water supply as there are problems: DFID's ultimate goal must be supporting governments to find locally appropriate solutions and ending the fundamental inequality that the poor pay the most for their water. This will involve a package of measures including strengthening public utilities, boosting governance and the crucial task of building local capacity to expand and maintain access to clean water.
Climate change, economic and population growth and urbanisation are increasingly putting decisions about how water resources are allocated and managed into sharp focus. DFID needs to scale up its work on water resources management. It should work with other donors to seek a reaffirmation of the failed 2005 global target to have national water management plans in place.
With an expanding budget and decreasing staff headcount, DFID needs to use its funds for sanitation and water efficiently, without compromising the quality of its aid. Central to the efficiency of DFID's investments will be: the effective deployment of DFID's own advisory capacity; reforms to multilateral aid mechanisms; the ability to work at the interface between the key basic social services of health, education, sanitation and water; and efforts to build capacity at local level to target and spend DFID funds effectively.
Clean water and adequate sanitation meet essential needs. DFID must maximise its crucial investment in sanitation and water.
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