International Development: Sanitation and Water

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale]

My Lords, 50 years ago this year, my parents moved to a farm in a very remote part of the Isle of Arran to build a business and grow a family. Although they had no mains electricity or water, they benefited from access to clean water in the hills and had the use of a septic tank and an electric generator. Partly as a result of that and partly due to their own skills and hard work, they developed an award-winning farm, as well as an award-winning team on the farm. I have always been very grateful that as a youngster I was able to grow up in such a beautiful place with access to clean water and sanitation.

Over the years as I have got older, I have become more and more angry that in a world where we talk about finding water on other planets and other such amazing developments, hundreds of millions of people all over the world today still do not have the access to clean water and sanitation that I enjoyed as a youngster. Indeed, the relevant millennium development goal, MDG 7, is unlikely to be reached. It is claimed that it may be reached and may already have been reached in relation to water, although I think that that claim may be made by the donor community rather than by those who are in need and who use the water, but on current predictions it will certainly not be reached in relation to sanitation. That is a tragedy in many respects, and I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells for drawing our attention to this matter this evening. I am also grateful to him and to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for their wide-ranging, intelligent speeches on the issues, and I want to add to, rather than duplicate, what they have said.

I agree entirely that this matter is central to the issue that many people all over the world talk about—girls in education. Sanitation is fundamental, particularly for those of teenage years. It can also be central as a cause of conflict. As with other natural resources, access to water can be a cause of long-lasting or occasional conflict, and it contributes directly to matters of hygiene and disease. The outcomes are entirely preventable, as we know here in London and as has already been mentioned by previous speakers. Critically, access, or the lack of access, to water and sanitation is an issue of productivity too. If we genuinely believe in sustainable development, access to water and sanitation has to be central to our development strategies, but also to the strategies employed within communities in the developing world.

It will simply not be possible to build sustainable, productive economies in situations where so many, particularly women and girls, spend so much time trying to access water or are affected by the diseases and conditions that result from a lack of access to safe water. A few years ago, it was estimated by the UNDP—it is almost certainly still relevant—that 40 billion hours of labour are lost in sub-Saharan Africa every year as a result of the time taken to access safe water and to bring it back to the family home or community. That is equivalent to a total year’s labour by everyone in the workforce of France. That is how much is lost every year by the simple day-to-day duty of travelling to safe water—sometimes it is not safe—and travelling back home again.

That lack of productivity, which impacts on the local economy, on families and on community development, is central to this issue. Although I certainly welcome the efforts that have been made over the years, given the impact that those efforts have had on the number of water pumps, the development of sanitation programmes, and the other crucial elements in the international strategy to tackle this issue and to try to reach that millennium development goal, we sometimes have to question the outcome. I do not think it is good enough for those who pay for this development strategy to claim that, as we have introduced a number of pumps or a number of sanitation programmes, which affect a number of people in different parts of the world, we have achieved our goals.

If those pumps are not in use and if the local communities are not able to maintain them because the skills are not there, the capacity is not in place and the pumps are useless. I suspect that if the true figures were known and the numbers calculated by those in need, the number of people who actually have access to safe water in the world today would be significantly less than that estimated by the donor community. We need to look at this from the perspective of those who use the water rather than from those of us who have been paying for it over the past few decades.

I urge the department, the Government and our international partners to think more deeply about the strategies that we can employ to put control of this issue in the hands of local communities. We need to train local people in the necessary skills to make water and sanitation developments sustainable so that they do not need to hire engineers from 200 miles away, who take six months to get there when the pump is out of use. They should not have to wait months and sometimes even years for pumps to be repaired. Training local communities and creating the infrastructure and the capacity in local government and local businesses, with systems of payment for repair, would help to regenerate local economies and ensure that the pumps are kept in regular use. If we do that, perhaps some day we will not only reach the targets that we have set ourselves and the targets that we congratulate ourselves upon as we reach them, but we will reach the point at which, across the world, everyone has access not only to water pumps but to clean water.