HDR 2006 - Links to the Millennium Development Goals
From WaterWiki.net
| edit Publication kit |
|---|
| Human Development Report 2006 - Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis |
| Report Overview | Chapter 1: Ending the Crisis in Water and Sanitation | Chapter 2: Water for human consumption | Chapter 3: The vast deficit in sanitation | Chapter 4: Water scarcity, risk and vulnerability | Chapter 5: Water competition in agriculture| | Chapter 6: Managing transboundary waters | Links to the Millennium Development Goals | Notes and Bibliography | UNDP Fast Facts |
| Background and issues papers:
(Link to full list of Papers for download) |
| Related WaterWiki articles:
Water Rights and Wrongs | Summary of Live Forum: HDR 2006 - From the Report to Action on the Ground |
| External Links: |
| Key Downloadables:
|
Eight reasons for the world to act on water and sanitation
The Millennium Development Goals are the world’s time-bound targets for overcoming extreme poverty and extending human freedom. Representing something more than a set of quantitative benchmarks to be attained by 2015, they encapsulate a broad vision of shared development priorities. That vision is rooted in the simple idea that extreme poverty and gross disparities of opportunity are not inescapable features of the human condition but a curable affliction whose continuation diminishes us all and threatens our collective security and prosperity.
The multifaceted targets set under the Millennium Development Goals cut across a vast array of interlinked dimensions of development, ranging from the reduction of extreme poverty to gender equality to health, education and the environment. Each dimension is linked through a complex web of interactions. Sustained progress in any one area depends critically on advances across all the other areas. A lack of progress in any one area can hold back improvements across a broad front. Water and sanitation powerfully demonstrate the linkages. Without accelerated progress in these areas many countries will miss the Millennium Development Goals. Apart from consigning millions of the world’s poorest people to lives of avoidable poverty, poor health and diminished opportunities, such an outcome would perpetuate deep inequalities within and between countries. While there is more to human development than the Millennium Development Goals, the targets set provide a useful frame of reference for understanding the linkages between progress in different areas—and the critical importance of progress in water and sanitation.
MDG Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Why governments should act
- The absence of clean water and adequate sanitation is a major cause of poverty and malnutrition:
- • One in five people in the developing world—1.1 billion in all—lacks access to an improved water source.
- • One in two people—2.6 billion in all—lacks access to adequate sanitation.
- • Diseases and productivity losses linked to water and sanitation in developing countries amount to 2% of GDP, rising to 5% in Sub-Saharan Africa—more than the region gets in aid.
- • In many of the poorest countries only 25% of the poorest households have access to piped water in their homes, compared with 85% of the richest.
- • The poorest households pay as much as 10 times more for water as wealthy households.
- Water is a vital productive input for the smallholder farmers who account for more than half of the world’s population living on less than $1 a day.
- Mounting pressure to reallocate water from agriculture to industry threatens to increase rural poverty
How governments should act
- Bringing water and sanitation into the mainstream of national and international strategies for achieving the Millennium Development Goals requires policies aimed at:
- • Making access to water a human right and legislating for the progressive implementation of that right by ensuring that all people have access to at least 20 litres of clean water a day.
- • Increasing public investment in extending the water network in urban areas and expanding provision in rural areas.
- • Introducing “lifeline tariffs”, cross-subsidies and investments in standpipes to ensure that nobody is denied access to water because of poverty, with a target ceiling of 3% for the share of household income spent on water.
- • Regulating water utilities to improve efficiency, enhance equity and ensure accountability to the poor.
- Introducing public policies that combine sustainability with equity in the development of water resources for agriculture.
- Supporting the development and adoption of pro-poor irrigation technologies.
MDG Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
Why governments should act
- Collecting water and carrying it over long distances keep millions of girls out of school, consigning them to a future of illiteracy and restricted choice.
- Water-related diseases such as diarrhoea and parasitic infections cost 443 million school days each year— equivalent to an entire school year for all seven-year-old children in Ethiopia—and diminish learning potential.
- Inadequate water and sanitation provision in schools in many countries is a threat to child health.
- The absence of adequate sanitation and water in schools is a major reason that girls drop out.
- Parasitic infection transmitted through water and poor sanitation retards learning potential for more than 150 million children.
How governments should act
- Linking targets and strategies for achieving universal primary education to strategies for ensuring that every school has adequate water and sanitation provision, with separate facilities for girls.
- Making sanitation and hygiene parts of the school curriculum, equipping children with the knowledge they need to reduce health risks and enabling them to become agents of change in their communities.
- Establishing public health programmes in schools and communities that prevent and treat water-related infectious diseases.
MDG Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
Why governments should act
- Deprivation in water and sanitation perpetuates gender inequality and disempowers women.
- Women bear the brunt of responsibility for collecting water, often spending up to 4 hours a day walking, waiting in queues and carrying water. This is a major source of time poverty.
- The time women spend caring for children made ill by waterborne diseases diminishes their opportunity to engage in productive work.
- Inadequate sanitation is experienced by millions of women as a loss of dignity and source of insecurity.
- Women account for the bulk of food production in many countries but experience restricted rights to water
How governments should act
- Putting gender equity in water and sanitation at the centre of national poverty reduction strategies.
- Enacting legislation that requires female representation on water committees and other bodies.
- Supporting sanitation campaigns that give women a greater voice in shaping public investment decisions and household spending.
- Reforming property rights and the rules governing irrigation and other water user associations to ensure that women enjoy equal rights
MDG Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
Why governments should act
- Dirty water and poor sanitation account for the vast majority of the 1.8 million child deaths each year from diarrhoea— almost 5,000 every day—making it the second largest cause of child mortality.
- Access to clean water and sanitation can reduce the risk of a child dying by as much as 50%.
- Diarrhoea caused by unclean water is one of the world’s greatest killers, claiming the lives of five times as many children as HIV/AIDS.
- Clean water and sanitation are among the most powerful preventative measures for child mortality: achieving the Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation at even the most basic level of provision would save more than 1 million lives in the next decade; universal provision would raise the number of lives saved to 2 million.
- Waterborne diseases reinforce deep and socially unjust disparities, with children in poor households facing a risk of death some three to four times greater than children in rich households
How governments should act
- Treating child deaths from water and sanitation as a national emergency—and as a violation of basic human rights.
- Using international aid to strengthen basic healthcare provision in preventing and treating diarrhoea.
- Establishing explicit linkages between targets for lowering child mortality and targets for expanding access to water and sanitation.
- Prioritizing the needs of the poorest households in public investment and service provision strategies for water and sanitation.
- Ensuring that Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers recognize the link between water and sanitation and child mortality.
- Publishing annual estimates of child deaths caused by water and sanitation problems.
MDG Goal 5: Improve maternal health
Why governments should act
- The provision of water and sanitation reduces the incidence of diseases and afflictions—such as anaemia, vitamin deficiency and trachoma—that undermine maternal health and contribute to maternal mortality.
How governments should act
- Treating water and sanitation provision as a key component in strategies for gender equality.
- Empowering women to shape decisions on water and sanitation at the household, local and national levels.
MDG Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Why governments should act
- Inadequate access to water and sanitation restricts opportunities for hygiene and exposes people with HIV/AIDS to increased risks of infection.
- HIV-infected mothers require clean water to make formula milk.
- Achieving the Millennium Development Goal target for water and sanitation would reduce the costs to health systems of treating water-related infectious diseases by $1.7 billion, increasing the resources available for HIV/AIDS treatment.
- Poor sanitation and drainage contribute to malaria, which claims some 1.3 million lives a year, 90% of them children under the age of five.
How governments should act
- Integrating water and sanitation into national and global strategies for tackling malaria and improving living conditions of HIV/AIDS patients.
- Ensuring that households caring for people with HIV/AIDS have access to at least 50 litres of free water.
- Investing in the drainage and sanitation facilities that reduce the presence of flies and mosquitoes
MDG Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
Halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation
Why governments should act
- The goal of halving the proportion of people without access to water and sanitation will be missed on current trends by 234 million people for water and 430 million people for sanitation.
- Sub-Saharan Africa will need to increase new connections for sanitation from 7 million a year for the past decade to 28 million a year by 2015.
- Slow progress in water and sanitation will hold back advances in other areas.
How governments should act
- Putting in place practical measures that translate Millennium Development Goal commitments into practical actions.
- Providing national and international political leadership to overcome the twin deficits in water and sanitation.
- Supplementing the Millennium Development Goal target with the target of halving water and sanitation coverage disparities between the richest and poorest 20%.
- Empowering independent regulators to hold service providers to account for delivering efficient and affordable services to the poor.
Reverse the loss of environmental resources
Why governments should act
- The unsustainable exploitation of water resources represents a growing threat to human development, generating an unsustainable ecological debt that will be transferred to future generations.
- The number of people living in water-stressed countries will increase from about 700 million today to more than 3 billion by 2025.
- Over 1.4 billion people currently live in river basins where the use of water exceeds minimum recharge levels, leading to the desiccation of rivers and depletion of groundwater.
- Water insecurity linked to climate change threatens to increase malnutrition by 75–125 million people by 2080, with staple food production in many Sub-Saharan African countries falling by more than 25%.
- Groundwater depletion poses a grave threat to agricultural systems, food security and livelihoods across Asia and the Middle East.
How governments should act
- Treating water as a precious natural resource, rather than an expendable commodity to be exploited without reference to environmental sustainability.
- Reforming national accounts to reflect the real economic losses associated with the depletion of water resources.
- Introducing integrated water resources management policies that constrain water use within the limits of environmental sustainability, factoring in the needs of the environment.
- Institutionalizing policies that create incentives for conserving water and eliminating perverse subsidies that encourage unsustainable water-use patterns.
- Strengthening the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon emissions in line with stabilization targets of 450 parts per million, bolstering clean technology transfer mechanisms and bringing all countries under a stronger multilateral framework for emission reductions in 2012.
- Developing national adaptation strategies for dealing with the impact of climate change —and increasing aid for adaptation.
MDG Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development
Why governments should act
- There is no effective global partnership for water and sanitation, and successive high-level conferences have failed to create the momentum needed to push water and sanitation in the international agenda.
- Many national governments are failing to put in place the policies and financing needed to accelerate progress.
- Water and sanitation is weakly integrated into Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
- Many countries with high child death rates caused by diarrhoea are spending less than 0.5% of * Rich countries have failed to prioritize water and sanitation in international aid partnerships, and spending on development assistance for the sector has been falling in real terms, now representing only 4% of total aid flows.
- International aid to agriculture has fallen by a third since the early 1990s, from 12% to 3.5% of total aid.
How governments should act
- Putting in place a global plan of action to galvanize political action, placing water and sanitation on to the agenda of the Group of Eight, mobilizing resources and supporting nationally owned planning processes.
- Developing nationally owned plans that link the Millennium Development Goal target for water and sanitation to clear medium-term financing provisions and to practical policies for overcoming inequality.
- Empowering local governments and local communities through decentralization capacity development and adequate financing, with at least 1% of GDP allocated to water and sanitation through public spending.
- Increasing aid for water by $3.6–$4 billion annually by 2010, with an additional $2 billion allocated to Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Increasing aid for agriculture from $3 billion to $10 billion annually by 2010, with a strengthened focus on water security.
Frontloading financing for meeting the Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation
Special contribution to the Summary HDR 2006- Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis.
From Japan to the European Union and to the United States people in the developed world take clean water and basic sanitation for granted. But across the world too many people are still denied access to these basic human rights. This Report powerfully documents the social and economic costs of a crisis in water and sanitation.
Not only are water and sanitation essential for human life but they are also the building blocks for development in any country. That is why one of the eight Millennium Development Goals has a specific target to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015.
The lack of clean water and sanitation disproportionately affects women and girls, who are traditionally responsible for fetching water for the family. For school-age girls the time spent travelling— sometimes hours—to the nearest source of water is time lost in education, denying them the opportunity to get work and to improve the health and living standards of their families and themselves. Schools with no access to clean water or sanitation are powerful evidence of the interconnectedness of human development and the Millennium Development Goals: you cannot build effective education systems when children are constantly sick and absent from school. And you cannot achieve education for all when girls are kept at home because their parents are worried by the absence of separate toilet facilities.
Today the link between clean water, improved health and increased prosperity is well understood. We have the knowledge, the technology and the financial resources to make clean water and sanitation a reality for all. We must now match these resources with the political will to act.
The infrastructure for an effective nationwide water and sanitation system—from water pipes to pumping stations to sewerage works—requires investment on a scale beyond what the poorest countries can begin to afford. Moreover, it requires large upfront investments as well as longer term maintenance costs. Given the high proportion of people in developing countries that lack access to water and sanitation and survive on less than $1 a day, it is not feasible to meet these upfront costs through user fees.
In 2005 developed country governments promised to increase the overall amount of aid for development. The European Union has committed to increasing aid to 0.7% of its income by 2015. The G-8 has committed to doubling aid to Africa by 2010. In making that promise, the G-8 recognized that one of the purposes of this aid was ensuring that developing country populations would have access to safe water and sanitation. However, traditional increases in donor aid budgets will not be enough to provide the additional resources and meet the aid targets that have been set. Innovative financing mechanisms are needed to deliver and bring forward the financing urgently needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals— and nowhere is this more evident than in water and sanitation.
Bluntly stated, the world cannot wait for the incremental flows of finance to come on-stream before tackling the water and sanitation crisis. That crisis is killing children and holding back development today—and we have to act now. That is why a range of innovative financing mechanisms have been considered and implemented with a view to mobilizing development finance upfront. The International Finance Facility (IFF) is one example.
The IFF mobilizes resources from international capital markets by issuing long-term bonds that are repaid by donor countries over 20–30 years. A critical mass of resources can thus be made available immediately for investment in development, while repayment is made over a longer period from the aid budgets of developed countries.
The frontloading principles have already been applied to the IFF for Immunization, which by immediately investing an extra $4 billion in vaccinations for preventable disease will save an astonishing 5 million lives between now and 2015 and a further 5 million thereafter.
These principles may also be very relevant for water. The rates of return from upfront investment in water and sanitation would significantly outweigh the costs of borrowing from bond markets, even taking into account the interest costs. Indeed, the WHO has estimated that the return on a $1 investment in sanitation and hygiene in low-income countries averages about $8. That is a good investment by any system of accounting.
The mobilization of resources from capital markets for investment in water and sanitation is not new. Industrial countries used bond issuances and capital markets to provide financing for investment in water and sanitation infrastructure at the start of the last century. And just recently countries such as South Africa issued municipal bonds to rapidly raise the critical mass of resources to make such investment.
Of course, we have to recognize that the new aid partnerships underpinning the Millennium Development Goals are a two-way contract. There are obligations and responsibilities on both sides. Developing countries should be judged on their ability to use aid resources efficiently and transparently to reach the poorest with clean water and sanitation. But they and their citizens are entitled to expect good policies to be backed by a predictable flow of aid financing commensurate with the scale of the challenge.
Developed countries should be judged not just on willing the Millennium Development Goals but on delivering the resources to achieve them. Helping provide clean water and basic sanitation will show that these promises are more than just a passing fashion— that they are a commitment for our generation.
By Gordon Brown, MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, United Kingdom and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Former Minister of Finance, Nigeria.
Reference, Links, Resources
Source
This article is based on the HDR 2006 Summary Report. 
HDR2006 English Summary.pdf
