UN recognises SA's achievements at service delivery

 10 November, 2006

Cape Town – Global recognition of South Africa's advances in delivering basic services to its citizens reached a high point yesterday when the United Nations Development Programme used the country as a base from which to launch its 2006 Human Development Report.

The report, titled “Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis”, warns that 1.1 billion people in the world still have no regular access to clean water and that 2.6 billion people still lack access to proper sanitation.

Saying that the global crisis in provision of water and sanitation is above all a crisis for the poor, the report argues that better political leadership is necessary to provide the will that result in increased delivery of these vital services.

 The report's lead author, Kevin Watkins of the UNDP, said yesterday at the launch of the report that South Africa's progress in delivering these services to its citizens over the past 12 years provided a model for others to follow in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

 South Africa has in recent years reduced the backlog in the provision of water to its citizens to 17 per cent, while the Director-General in the Water Affairs and Forestry Department, Jabulani Sindane, said that universal access to water in South Africa would be accomplished by 2008, with the sanitation goal being met by 2010.

 This puts the country far ahead in the global race to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), set out at a key United Nations meeting in 2000.

 South Africa currently provides indigent households with a free basic six kilolitres of water a month, amounting to about 25 litres per person per day.

 The UN has called for this example to be emulated worldwide, with a minimum of 20 litres per person per day as a basic, legislated right and free for those too poor to afford it.

 Mr Watkins said that the developing world in particular “can take great hope from the experience of South Africa”, which has “shown leadership in making water a basic human right”.

 He warned that many developing countries – particularly those of sub-Saharan Africa, which is lagging behind the rest of the world in meeting the MDGs of halving poverty by 2015 – are facing an humanitarian emergency over the “twin deficits” of water and sanitation.

 Echoing the words of Mr Watkins was UNDP administrator Kemal Dervis who said that a market-based approach alone would not solve the problem.

 He added that public-sector intervention and leadership to “embed market institutions in wider political and human institutions in making sure that the needs of all are truly addressed by economic forces”.

 Again this year, the Human Development Report – first launched by the UN in 1990 – analyses and measures the problem using an approach governed by “hard head and a soft heart”, an approach evident in South Africa, said Mr Dervis.

 At the same time, the crisis sparked by the failure to provide water at affordable prices to all citizens has led to a crisis which is now holding back economic growth, costing sub-Saharan Africa five per cent of its GDP annually – “far more than the region receives in aid”, the report says.

Across the world each year, says the report, 1.8 million children die from diarrhoea when this could have been prevented with access to clean water and a toilet, while 443 million school days are lost to water-related illnesses – not to mention the school days lost to especially female children who assist with fetching water from rivers and other sources.

A glaring injustice, says Mr Watkins, is that across the world, the poor are forced to pay more for clean water than their affluent neighbours.

He cited the example of a Nairobi slum where people pay five to 10 times more per litre of water than wealthy people living in the same city.

The poorest households of El Salvador, Nicaragua and Jamaica, according to the report, spend on average over 10 percent of their incomes on water, while in Britain only the very poorest spend more than three percent of family income on water.

More widely, the report finds that the gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world is growing, with sub-Saharan Africa showing “no signs of improving”.

“Being born on the wrong side of the street in the global village carries with it a large risk in terms of survival prospects,” says the report, noting that only three sub-Saharan countries will reach the MDG of cutting child mortality by two-thirds by 2015.

 “Globalisation has given rise to a protracted debate over trends in global income distribution, but we sometimes lose sight of the sheer depth of inequality – and of how greater equity could dramatically accelerate poverty reduction,” says Mr Watkins.

A global action plan under leadership of the Group of 8 highly industrialised countries is “urgently needed” to resolve this growing water and sanitation crisis, says the report, with Mr Watkins warning that at current trends the MDG of 2015 for water would be achieved by 2040, while the MDG for sanitation would be met only by 2070.

“National governments need to draw up credible plans and strategies for tackling the crisis in water and sanitation. But we also need a Global Action Plan – with active buy-in from the G8 countries – to focus fragmented international efforts to mobilise resources and galvanise political action by putting water and sanitation front and centre on the development agenda,” said Mr Watkins.

Mr Dervis added that each one of the eight MDGs “is inextricably tied to the next, so if we fail on the water and sanitation goal, hope of reaching the other seven rapidly fails”.

He also warned of the pending dangers of climate change, for which the report focuses largely on adaptation, warning that rain fed agricultural production – the source of livelihood for most of the world's poorest people – faced “grave risks in many regions”.

By 2050, says the report, projections have pointed to a decline of 30 percent or more in water run-off from rainfall for large swathes of the developing world, with drought-prone countries including Angola, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe facing some of the “gravest security challenges in the world”.

The UN officials present at the launch of the report – which also provides a global development index of 177 countries listed from high to low – indicated that South Africa was chosen as the site from which to launch this year's report largely because of the country's recent and rapid advances in widespread delivery of vital services to all of its citizens.

By 2004, 15.5 million households in South Africa were receiving water, sewerage and sanitation services – 4.5 million more than in 2002.

While 8.5 million households were receiving water, while sanitation was lagging slightly behind at seven million households.

The same year, according to National Treasury, 6.5 million households were receiving the free basic allotment of water. – By Shaun Benton, BuaNews