USAID joins Sanitation and Water for All Partnership - great news

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 20, 2012
Public Information: 202-712-4810

www.usaid.gov

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah announced that the U.S. Agency for International Development has joined the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) Partnership. The SWA Partnership brings together governments, donors, civil society organizations, and development partners to achieve sustainable sanitation and drinking water.

USAID and the U.S. Department of State are committing a total of $1 million to the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program. The investment will support the SWA-led National Planning for Results Initiative, which promotes national planning efforts related to sanitation and water. The economic gains from investing in sanitation and water are estimated at $170 billion per year.

"The United States Government considers sanitation and water and our related partnering activities to be a critical component of our overall international development assistance effort," Administrator Shah said during remarks at the SWA High Level Meeting. "We look forward to maximizing the potential of this partnership, which brings together such a range of tools, experience, and approaches. Working together, we can not only reach full coverage, but we can also do it in the most effective, efficient, and collaborative way."

Established in 2010, SWA's biennial High Level Meeting brings together Ministers of Finance from developing countries, Ministers of Development Cooperation from donor countries, and high-level representatives from development banks and other donor institutions.

Last month, the United Nations announced that the Millennium Development Goal for a 50 percent reduction in the number of people living without access to safe drinking water had been achieved in 2010 - five years ahead of schedule. Even with that target met, more than 780 million people, particularly those in fragile states and poor communities, still live without access to safe water.

Progress in sanitation has been slower. Today, 2.5 billion people still lack access to improved sanitation and it is unlikely that the Millennium Development Goal target for sanitation will be met by 2015.

Water and sanitation become human rights, albeit turbidly

The Lancet gets it exactly right in the opinion piece below. The recent UNGA resolution enshrining water and sanitation as human rights is a step in the right direction. More importantly, it is not the enshrining of water and sanitation as human rights that is the end game, but rather the realization, the manifestation of those rights for the almost 1b without water and 2.6b without sanitation. 


Read on:

On July 28, the UN General Assembly adopted a nonbinding resolution calling on states and international organisations “to scale up efforts to provide safe, clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for all”. Water and sanitation are now enshrined as basic human rights. However, of 163 delegates from member nations who voted on this resolution, 41 abstained and did not fully endorse this right. Why?


Some delegates felt the decision to hold the vote was pre-emptive, and all countries could have reached consensus—and thereby avoided the need for a vote—if more time was allowed to interpret legal outcomes of the move for public and private suppliers. Most delegates who abstained, and some who endorsed the resolution, were anticipating a report to be published later this year by an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC).


The Brazilian delegate, who voted yes, decried the absence of an “appropriate forum” to debate the resolution, and the UK’s delegate, who abstained, said that the resolution was not proposed “with consensus in mind”. Nevertheless, the justifications given by the 41 countries that abstained, including the USA, Japan, and Canada, were not convincing.


Irrespective of politicking at the UN, 884 million people worldwide do not have regular access to clean water, and 2·6 billion do not have access to basic sanitation. The 2010 Millennium Development Goal 7 report states that the target of halving the number of people without access to safe water is on course to be met by 2015, but provision of sanitation is not.


The practice of open defecation by 1·1 billion people is not only “an affront to human dignity”, but also the key source of faecal–oral transmitted diseases such as diarrhoea, which causes 1·3 million deaths per year in children younger than 5 years. A little more than 5 years through the UN General Assembly’s Water for Life Decade, adequate supply of water and sanitation is far from universal. When the HRC’s report is published, the hope is that no country obstructs a binding commitment to provide clean water and sanitation for all.


The Lancet

Guinness Donates Water Project to Community

And here are a few of my favorite things: Guinness and safe water, in ONE blog post. Not actually all that surprising considering Diageo's Water of Life corporate social responsibility push for safe water in Africa.

Quick article re Guinness in Nigeria:

Nigeria: Guinness Donates Water Project to Community

28 May 2010
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As part of its corporate social responsibility in Nigeria, Guinness Nigeria Plc, has commissioned a water scheme at Iperu-Remo in Ikenne-Remo Local Government of Ogun State.

The donation of the facilities is to give the people in the community access to good water. The water project will also extend to one million Nigerians in various communities by the year 2011 according to Mr. Jamie Anderson, Commercial Director of Guinness. The project in Iperu-Remo is a complete mini waterworks of boreholes, overhead storage tank, water treatment plant, reticulation network and a standby power source.

While unveiling the project, Mr. Jamie Anderson, Commercial Director of Guinness, said that the provision of portable water is a key component of Guinness corporate citizenship agenda.

Anderson,who was represented at the commissioning by Mr Mike Onuoha, Head of Public Policy, said that the water project is in line with the United Nations Millennium Development Goal to halve by 2015 the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

He disclosed that as a good corporate citizen, its parent company, Diageo is dedicated to providing clean water to one million people in Africa every year.

He however explained that the challenge is more than meeting the target date saying that "it is about building excitement and motivation, it is about showing leadership and strength and it is about making a real and positive impact to our communities".

Anderson recalled that Guinness has so far provided water to over 900,000 Nigerians under its Water of Life programme adding that the Iperu Remo project will benefit about 50,000 people in the community.