Quenching the world’s thirst

By Teresa Küchler

Date: 14/07/05

Goals: Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

A lack of safe clean water has been described by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a "silent humanitarian crisis".

According to a report from the WHO and UNICEF from last year, four out of ten of the world's population do not have access to the simplest pit latrines and more than a fifth are forced to drink water from unclean sources. As a consequence, half of all hospital beds in the world are filled with people suffering from water-related diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea. Out of the 1.8 million people that die of diarrhoea every year, a majority are children under the age of five.

The uncontrolled pace of urbanisation in developing countries is a big part of the problem with large slum areas in the outskirts of big cities. Today, more than a third of the populations in Africa, Asia and Latin America live in slum conditions. A slum household is defined as a household that lacks access to clean water and improved sanitation.

According to UN-Habitat, the problems with decent housing, sanitation measures and efficient clean water supply systems can only be solved by reducing poverty, another of the daunting challenges facing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). At the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (WSSD), the EU launched "the EU Water Initiative" (EUWI) designed to contribute to the achievement of the MDGs' targets for drinking water and sanitation, based on partnerships that draw together government, civil society, private sector and other stakeholders.

But the private sector's involvement in poor countries' water supply has been controversial. For the multinational water companies, the lack of water can be highly profitable. More than half a billion people depend on private water companies. In the 1990s there were various examples of badly thought-through takeovers of poor countries' national water supply for households by private companies, followed by fierce protests and in some cases, like Bolivia and Uruguay, re-nationalisation of the 'blue gold'.

José Antonio Ocampo, United Nations undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs, believes that providing safe drinking water for the world population is an achievable goal, but it requires significant international investment of capital from the world's rich nations. Today, only a third of the estimated $180 billion (@149bn) necessary to reach the MDG on water supply is used for this purpose.

Article looks at what the EU does to achieve the Millennium Development Goals concerning the access to safe, clean water: 'Reduce, by 2015, by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.