International Development: Sanitation and Water

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells. We have had very thoughtful contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, and the noble Lord, Lord McConnell. I hope to add to what they have said, based on a number of sources, not least my own experience.

I do not know whether any noble Lord saw a rather alarming headline in the Times of London a couple of weeks ago that said that, in India, more people have access to mobile phones than to clean water. That was meant to be quite shocking and of course it was. I started to think a little more about that and it occurred to me that one of the reasons for the mobile phone explosion was not just because people wanted phones but because they are easy to get. They provide a cash flow and a really good opportunity for investment and profit. The industry does not require large, expensive and hard to maintain infrastructure. It is a satellite issue, with nothing much on the ground. Now compare that with providing clean water and sanitation. You need a large, comprehensive network to provide water or to deal with sanitation. In countries such as India, that is not so easy. It is expensive and it is hard to maintain.

We are also dealing with the fact that the United Nations has already declared clean water and sanitation to be a human right, which tends to introduce a reluctance in the population and Governments to charge reasonable rates for their provision. It makes it a bit more difficult. There is also no alternative to a mobile phone. You cannot introduce a landline and set up telegraph poles. That does not work in continents such as India. There is, however, an alternative to ground water. It is not exactly attractive; it is going to be untreated—I am afraid to say that open-air defecation is still the traditional practice in much of India and other parts of the world—but it is a water supply. There is a reason why the expansion of clean water and sanitation cannot keep pace with the attractiveness of the mobile phone; indeed, the newspaper report is not quite as shock-horror as noble Lords might think.

Nevertheless, there has been progress. The millennium development goal target for halving the number of people without access to safe water was met in 2010, as we know. However, while we have concrete proof, as the Secretary of State has said, that well-spent aid makes a difference to the lives of the poorest people, we have heard from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells that more than 780 million are still without clean water.

I must just add a few words about sub-Saharan Africa to the points that have already been made. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular lags behind. Two-thirds of the global population without an improved water source can be found in just 10 countries, six of them in Africa. Of the 50 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, only 19 are on track to meet the millennium development goals by 2015. Indications from UNICEF’s latest alternative means of analysing progress, its joint monitoring programmes, throw up some sobering trends in what is actually happening, particularly the urban-rural disparities associated with poverty and the relationship between progress and rapid population growth over the last 20 years. Rapid population growth has resulted in it being quite easy to lose any gains that have been achieved, because the additional capacity that has been provided has been taken up. On this basis, nearly 900 million people in sub-Saharan African live in countries where only 25 per cent have access to clean water. That is a very long way from the 50 per cent assumed in the millennium development goals. We are clearly not going to get there by 2015.

Turning briefly to the MDG to improve access to sanitation to 50 per cent, currently more than 2.6 billion people do not have access to flush toilets. Over 1.1 billion people still defecate in the open, and the MDG report calculates that it would take until 2049 to provide more than 75 per cent of the global population with improved sanitation—the amount needed to meet the MDG target. The right reverend Prelate made the point that to get everyone on mains loos would take another 250 years. That is a startling figure.

Much of sub-Saharan Africa is lagging sadly and desperately behind. Nearly half of the population uses either shared or unimproved facilities, an estimated 25 per cent practise open defecation, a decrease of only 11 per cent since 1990. In fact, with population growth this means that the number of people practising open defecation has increased by 33 million since then. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of people using unimproved sanitation of any region.

I will say a few words about capacity-building, as this is quite an important aspect of this issue. The countries lagging furthest behind the MDG targets on water and sanitation are those where capacity is poor. They are often conflict-affected states with weak institutions. In those countries, where political stability is also challenged, policy development and departmental roles and responsibilities are unclear. Accountability and transparency are weak and the provision of water and sanitation services does not figure high on the agenda for career advancement in civil service departments.

The right reverend Prelate called for clean water, medicine, and education for girls. I would add political stability and capacity to that list if we are going to underpin these essential requirements. We will not achieve them without that. Institutional strengthening and technical assistance are by no means as straightforward as they seem. In my experience, appointing counterpart engineers—to pick up a point made earlier—to work with local staff can easily be compromised when you are trying to manage a project for a client team that is used to working, for example, in a French administrative system in French with young engineers who have been trained in Russia in Russian and dealing with a donor from the Middle East who refuses to work in anything but English. It is quite a challenge. You achieve the project, but you do not achieve the training. That is why there is a real problem about capacity-building. If you ensure that people can take ownership of the facilities and feel that they are theirs rather than the donors’ or the experts’, they start to look after them and cherish what they have.