House of Commons - International Development

Select Committee on International Development Sixth Report

1 INTRODUCTION

1. The inter-connecting nature of development targets is often highlighted by development actors, including the Department for International Development (DFID). However, Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7, Target 10, which seeks to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, has a strong claim to being the most integral to the other targets' success. 1.1 billion people are deprived of access to clean water and face a daily struggle to access and transport it. Women and girls tend to bear the burden of fetching water, trading valuable hours that could be spent at work and in school for arduous and often unsafe journeys to the nearest water source. An even greater problem faces people in accessing adequate sanitation: 2.6 billion people lack access to 'improved sanitation'—which itself is a low marker of adequate provision and could be as basic as a shared pit latrine.

2. Achieving the sanitation and water targets would catalyse the attainment of all eight MDGs. Relieving women and girls of their water-fetching burden would help to promote gender equality (MDG3) and boost school enrolment rates (MDG2). In turn, girls who have been educated have improved maternal health (MDG5) and are twice as likely to stay safe from AIDS (MDG6).[2] Improved access to clean water would reduce diarrhoea and water-borne diseases, and the transition from unimproved to improved sanitation is accompanied by a 30%-plus reduction in child mortality (MDG4).[3] Irrigation accounts for 70-90% of water use in the developing world, and links closely with the MDG1 target seeking to reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. The sanitation and water targets' positioning within MDG7 makes explicit the link with environmental sustainability. Developing and strengthening international networks for sanitation and water would contribute towards the attainment of MDG8, seeking a global partnership for development.

3. But despite its pivotal importance, progress on the sanitation target, in particular, is lamentable: on current trends the target will not be met until 2076. Whilst the water target is on-track to be met by 2015 in most areas—a significant exception being sub-Saharan Africa—the rate of progress has slowed considerably.[4] Whichever markers are used, the scale of the problem is huge: as Kevin Watkins, Director of the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report told us, "I do think there is a very real sense in which we need to stop treating water and sanitation as a problem in development and start treating it as a crisis in development because it is a crisis on a grand scale."[5]

4. Whilst the current water crisis is driven more by inequality and poverty than by scarcity, availability will increasingly become a major problem, sharpening inequalities in access and raising the spectre of conflict over water resources.[6] It is clear that the world's climate is changing and that developing countries, more reliant on subsistence agriculture and often dependent on natural resources, are likely to be hit the hardest by climate change. Indeed, the impact is already being felt in Africa, for example, where water availability decreased substantially between 1975 and 1995—a trend that is likely to continue with increasing drought, desertification and extreme weather events.[7] Water resources are also under increasing pressure from population increase, urbanisation and rising demand due to economic growth.

DFID's response

5. DFID is frank in admitting that it "took its eye off the ball" in recent years in relation to sanitation and water.[8] Dr Darren Saywell of the International Water Association identified "A major watershed, in my opinion, in 2002 just after the World Summit on Sustainable Development when DFID restructured itself, and a lot of the impetus and momentum that went into water and sanitation was lost at that time."[9]

6. DFID is now looking to re-establish its leadership role on sanitation and water. The 2006 White Paper identified sanitation and water as one of four essential public services for the MDGs. The Department followed this up by doubling its aid to Africa for sanitation and water, with a pledge to double it again to £200 million a year by 2010.

7. However, money alone will not provide toilets and taps—nor drive demand and the behaviour change necessary for sustainable uptake—for the billions of people who currently lack access. A series of other measures are required to transform funding promises into action, including: the generation of global political will; international aid instruments that are fit for purpose; well-resourced, coherent and effective multilateral mechanisms; and the effectiveness of DFID's organisational capacity to support sanitation and water. Capacity at local and national level to implement scaled-up efforts on sanitation and water is a particular source of concern. As we were told in written evidence from Dr Andrew Cotton of Loughborough University, "It is arguable that lack of institutional, organisational and individual capacity in the sector is a more serious constraint than lack of finance."[10]

8. Clearly, improving access to water goes hand-in-hand with managing water resources efficiently.[11] Water Resources Management (WRM) involves decisions over who needs water, how to get water to those who need it, and what happens to water once it has been used.[12] Climate change is making WRM more important than ever—yet the global community has already comprehensively failed to meet a target seeking to ensure that all countries had national Integrated Water Resources Management Plans and Water Efficiency Plans in place by 2005.[13] WRM has had insufficient attention from donors—including DFID—despite its inseparable relationship with increased water supply.[14]

9. Close attention must therefore be paid to DFID's ability to translate its high-level funding promises for sanitation and water into programme delivery.[15] Increasing financial inputs does not guarantee the required outputs. The current climate of civil service efficiency savings—which entail a DFID staff headcount reduction of 10%—brings this imperative into yet sharper focus. A key question emerging is how easy it is to actually spend money on what is needed for sanitation and water at the scale required whilst maintaining the quality of DFID's aid.[16] Answering this question requires attention to a range of issues, a number of which we raised in our report on DFID's Departmental Report 2006—notably "doing more with less" by using strategies such as outsourcing, raising contributions to multilateral institutions and increased use of Poverty Reduction Budget Support.[17]

10. These efficiency issues are relevant to all areas of DFID's work, but particularly to aspects of the water sector and even more so to sanitation. Sanitation is a complex sector: demand is often not clearly articulated due to stigma and lack of awareness; building physical infrastructure will only be effective up to a point—behaviour change is equally, if not more, important—and sanitation tends to have no institutional 'home', meaning that multi-faceted programme strategies and disbursements are likely to be fragmented across a variety of ministries and levels of government. As Dr Andrew Cotton noted in his evidence, "If you want an easy way to disburse large amounts of money, then you don't do sanitation—or at least not sanitation that targets the poor in countries that are most off-track."[18] Neither is it easy to spend quickly and easily on the water sector, which also suffers from institutional fragmentation, and requires substantial technical expertise and sensitive interventions attuned to specific contexts.

Our visit to Ethiopia

11. We visited Ethiopia in February 2007 to observe DFID's work on sanitation and water in practice. We saw a country with a desperate need—Ethiopia has almost the lowest sanitation coverage in the world (13%) and is one of most off-track African countries in meeting the MDG targets on sanitation and water—and huge potential: the country has abundant water resources but only a tiny proportion are currently used.[19]

12. Levels of UK development assistance in Ethiopia are rising, from £60 million in 2004-05, to £90 million in 2005-06, and to £130 million in 2007-08—to make Ethiopia DFID's largest aid programme in Africa. A new DFID water supply, sanitation and hygiene programme for Ethiopia was approved by the Secretary of State, Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP, in September 2006. This envisages that DFID will provide a total of up to £100 million over the five year period 2007-12, making DFID one of the lead donors on sanitation and water within the country.

13. DFID Ethiopia has a strong team, with innovative approaches to deploying its sanitation and water expertise, including an adviser seconded into the Ministry of Water Resources. However, we saw DFID's headcount restrictions beginning to exert real pressures in practical terms: we were led to ask how, even with increased expenditure through multilateral channels, a budget that was more than doubling over the course of three years could be spent effectively without putting unsustainable pressure on staff.

The structure of this report

14. As is evident from the report title, we have chosen to reverse the conventional situating of sanitation as an adjunct to water, and will address sanitation first (in Chapter 2) as a separate sector requiring distinct strategies to address the current dismal progress towards the MDG target. Chapter 3 will explore current financing and aid instruments for the two sectors, looking at the respective roles of—and co-operation between—governments, bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs and the private sector in financing sanitation and water. Chapter 4 will look at how DFID can help facilitate equitable water service delivery across both rural and urban contexts. Chapter 5 will address Water Resources Management (WRM) and the impact of climate change on strategies towards this. Chapter 6 will focus on the nexus between sanitation, water and other basic services, particularly health and education, as well as the close link between water and agriculture.

2 Barbara Herz and Gene B. Sperling, What Works in Girls' Education: Evidence and Policies from the Developing World (Council on Foreign Relations, 2004); and Global Campaign for Education, Missing the Mark: A School Report on rich countries' contribution to Universal Primary Education by 2015 (2005). Back

3 UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, p.115. Back

4 Ev 228 [Dr Andrew Cotton] Back

5 Q1 [Kevin Watkins] Back

6 Ev 168 [WaterAid] Back

7 Ev 242 [Good Earth Trust] Back

8 Q 225 [Hilary Benn] Back

9 Q 110 [Dr Darren Saywell] Back

10 Ev 230 [Dr Andrew Cotton] Back

11 Q 189 [John Chilton] Back