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Africa: Water, Health, and Development
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Nov 24, 2006 (061124)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"We estimate that the African region loses five per cent of GDP
annually as a result of both women having to walk huge distances to
collect water - which diverts labor, apart from the huge personal
cost that it puts someone in - and the impact of disease on
productivity." - Kevin Watkins, lead author, UN Human Development
Report 2006
Actually, there is not a scarcity of water in Africa, notes Kevin
Watkins in an interview with AllAfrica.com. But there is a mismatch
between where water is and where people are, both geographically
and in terms of water management. The real issue of scarcity,
Watkins stresses, is the governance of water supply. About 700,000
people in the Kibera slum area in Nairobi pay more for water per
unit than do people in New York or London. But the Royal Nairobi
Golf Course has sprinklers running 12 hours a day.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from an interview with
Kevin Watkins by AllAfrica.com. Another AfricaFocus Bulletin
contains two press releases on the report from the United Nations
Development Programme, the agency responsible for the Human
Development Report series.
For the full report, as well as additional articles and an
extensive collection of previous Human Development Reports at world
and country levels, visit the UNDP's Human Development Report
website (http://hdr.undp.org).
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
'The Most Effective Vaccine against Child Death in Africa is a
Glass of Clean Water'
Interview
http://allAfrica.com
November 10, 2006
Washington, DC
[Reposted with permission. Full interview available at
http://allafrica.com/stories/200611100001.html, along with
additional material on the 2006 Human Development Report]
Kevin Watkins, the lead author of the UN Human Development Report
and head of the office that produces it, visited AllAfrica recently
to discuss this year's document. Released on November 9, the 2006
report notes that the average person in the UK or the USA flushes
50 litres of water down the toilet daily, while as little as 20
litres of clean water a day can save millions of lives and promote
economic development. Excerpts from the conversation:
I think scarcity is a loaded concept when you apply it to water. If
you look at water availability in Africa as a region, there is not
a scarcity of water. The problem is when you start disaggregating
the region. Africa's water is very heavily concentrated in a few
countries, in a few places - often places where there are not many
people - so there is a mismatch between where water is and where
people are.
Discounting regions that are acutely drought prone - parts of the
Sahel and northeast Kenya and so on the real issue of scarcity in
most of sub-Saharan Africa, we would argue, is a product of
governance and how water is managed. Take Nairobi as a classic
example. About 700,000 people live in an area called Kibera.
Clean water is acutely scarce. There is a child death rate
something like seven times the Kenyan average because of
water-related infectious disease - mostly diarrhea. Water is very
expensive for people who live in Kibera. In fact, the per-unit cost
of water is higher than it is in New York or London. So you could
infer from that that Nairobi is a city where water is scarce.
But over the main road from Kibera, you have the Royal Nairobi Golf
Course, which has the sprinklers operating on a 12-hour-a-day
basis. Right next to the seventh green, you have [former Kenyan
President Daniel] Arap Moi's house, which has a swimming pool and
a very green lawn. So water is very scarce for some people in
Nairobi but is very abundant for other people.
What we are trying to look at in this report is the politics of
scarcity. Why is water scarce for some people and not for other
people? There is a scarcity issue at a household level but that
is structured scarcity, and it is politically structured. It
reflects decisions on investment and about how you govern the
resource.
Part of the report looks at water for livelihoods. Water is a
productive resource. Africa is in a different position than most
other developing regions, because it has very limited water
infrastructure. Probably 90 per cent-plus of African producers rely
on rain-fed agriculture. So, as a region, Africa has got something
like one to two per cent of global irrigation capacity. That means
that the region is very highly dependent on rainfall, which is
variable. It is that variability that makes agricultural production
in Africa such a risky activity - and why you find such high levels
of poverty relative to rural areas in south Asia, where they have
irrigation.
There are obviously difficult questions around the irrigation
issue. If you create irrigation resources, who gets access to them
and who doesn't? We actually try to show, in the report, that in
the parts of the Sahel where they have introduced irrigation, the
access is being distributed in a very unequal way. So again, there
is the question of structured scarcity - some people get it, and
some people don't.
We are trying to sort of politicize the idea of scarcity. Too often
people write about water problems as if this is somehow a natural
or physical outcome. What we are trying to say that it is not a
physical outcome, but it is a political outcome. You need to
understand the politics of it, and that is what we are really
trying to focus on.
Women, Water and Development
A big part of what we do in the report is sorting out what the
problem is. We commissioned a study, which we did with the World
Health Organization, trying to understand the real public health
outcomes from the water crisis in Africa. The headline number that
comes out is: globally there are roughly two million child deaths
as a result of not having access to clean water. And Africa is
hugely over represented in that number. It accounts for something
like a third or more, roughly 40% of total child deaths from
water-related problems. That is a health outcome.
There is a parallel outcome, which is the impact of all of this on
economic growth, and how that relates to investment in areas like
public health and education. We estimate that the African region
loses five per cent of GDP annually as a result of both women
having to walk huge distances to collect water - which diverts
labor, apart from the huge personal cost that it puts someone in -
and the impact of disease on productivity.
And five per cent of GDP is a lot of GDP. It is more than Africa
gets in aid! There are more people campaigning on aid and debt
relief, but this problem dwarfs what goes into Africa through aid
and debt relief. The real burden, when you get down to the
household level, is uses of women's time. And I think that people
do not understand the problem, to be honest.
In Kibera, you see these little kids, young girls, carrying 20
liter buckets of water. This is more than half of their body
weight. Walking for more than an hour in rural areas is even worse.
The minimum amount of water that people need, and what we argue in
the report, is 20 liters daily. We say 20 liters should be a right
of citizenship. In rural villages in parts of east Africa, and even
in urban areas, and people are using 9 or 10 liters of water a day.
Now if you have sick person in the house, and you have nine liters
of water a day for cooking, for washing, for drinking, it's
impossible to meet basic public health standards, apart from the
huge costs in terms of children who get infected with unclean
water. Actually, what we say in the report is that there's a lot of
thinking that's going on about immunization - and of course that's
critical - but, actually, the most effective vaccine that you can
give against child death in Africa is a glass of clean water.
Public versus Private Water
It's a huge explosive issue in most countries. We come out in an
aggressively agnostic position. Which is to say that for most poor
people in most of Africa, this debate is totally irrelevant.
Most people in Africa are operating in totally privatized water
markets - most poor people, I mean - regardless of what the formal
water system. You've got 700,000 people in Kibera who are operating
in a total free market for water. They get out of bed in the
morning; they take their money to the water kiosk; they buy their
water; they go home.
Arap Moi ought to have a big interest in whether the water utility
is public or private, because he's getting cheap water. But for
people in Kibera, this is a different story.
Africa has one of the lowest connection rates. It's about 40 per
cent, officially, who don't have access to piped water or an
improved water source. We say that the real figure is way, way
higher than that. The other thing that we do, which is even more
interesting in some ways, is we've got the national breakdown of
who's got access to water and who doesn't. Then we've used
micro-level household data for differentiating between the richest
20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent, and some of those figures
are very ugly for Africa. For example, in Ghana connection rate for
the richest 20 per cent is something like 85 per cent-plus. For the
poorest 20 per cent it is something like 10 per cent-minus, which
comes back to the realities of these poor people who are in the
water market, which is not connected to the utility.
Climate Change - a Predictable Disaster
We've got a very strong environmental- change, global-warming story
on sub-Saharan Africa in the report. We've looked at the
implications for the production of food staples of shifting
climatic patterns, and I think that's a pretty disturbing story
that the international community needs to take a lot more seriously
then they have.
I'm sure everybody's aware that climate change is already affecting
weather patterns all across Africa. It probably started in the
Sahel in the 70's and 80's, and we see it now in Ethiopia and
north-east Kenya and parts of southern Africa. So the first thing
that people need to understand, which most people don't - people
think of global warming as something that's going to really hit us
in fifty years time, and, actually, this already happening to a lot
of people.
Especially in Africa, this has a special relevance. It's one thing
if you have more variability in rainfall in an irrigated system -
because an irrigated system is a sort of guarantor against risk.
You don't have that in Africa. If it doesn't rain, you don't grow
food, and that's the end of the story. So it's more vulnerable than
any other part of the world.
The evidence is that if you put together the changing rainfall
patterns with the changing temperature patterns, you've got a story
slightly less rain in many countries - but, even in countries where
you might get more rain, it's going to be hotter. You've got more
evaporation, and there will be less moisture in the soil. We have
a map which shows parts of Africa where the projection is for
declines in food staple productivity of 25 per cent or more.
Now, if you said to the average person in America, "How would you
adjust to a 25 per cent drop in your income in the next 5 years or
so?" it would create a big panic. This is a greater drop then you
had in the great depression. Yet this is something which is pretty
predictably coming down the line for sub-Saharan Africa.
What we've tried to do, rather than just looking at rainfall
patterns, is to take the rainfall patterns, plus temperature
change, and look at the implications of that for moisture in the
soil and then go from that to crop productivity. You've got a whole
belt across southern Sudan and the Sahel, but also in southern
Africa; there are chunks of Zambia and Namibia, which are really
adversely affected.
If you look at the Horn [of northeast Africa] for example, this is
already chronically vulnerable to drought and hunger. So you are
superimposing this on what is already a pretty disastrous
situation. If you look at a map of the United States, most of the
agriculture benefits from global warming. But even if it didn't,
you've got populations who can adapt and adjust to these sorts of
pressures. How do you adapt, when you're living on a dollar a day,
to a 25 per cent drop in production? There's no adaptation capacity
for that.
The problem, in terms of the response, is that at an international
level, the whole debate about climate change is about mitigation:
how do rich countries produce less carbon? Which is fine, and they
should be producing a lot less carbon and do it very quickly, but
even if they do, it's not going to change these outcomes. The
carbon stock is up there, and you can't really change this
projection. So the real question for a lot of Africa is: how do you
adapt to the problem?
If you look at the adaptation story globally, some countries are
drawing up really serious adaptation plans. For example, the
Netherlands, has got a very good adaptation plan, and so do Britain
and California.
You will not find a single credible climate-change adaptation plan
in sub-Saharan Africa, even if you look up poverty-reduction
strategy papers for sub-Saharan Africa adaptation to climate
change. There is almost no funding for it. In fact, aid to Africa
for agriculture has been cut really heavily over the past decade or
so.
So this is a totally predictable disaster. This isn't like the
tsunami, where you couldn't anticipate it. You can absolutely
anticipate, over the next thirty years, that we're going to see
more droughts, more floods, more rural livelihoods in jeopardy. And
yet there's no real policy response, either at the national level
or the global level. We are really trying to highlight that
particular threat.
Across National Boundaries
There is a map in the report that shows shared river basins - and I
think more Africans live in shared-river-basin countries, as a
proportion of total population, than in any other region. So
trans-boundary water is the real water story actually in
sub-Saharan Africa.
How it affects water scarcity is not clear cut. There are parts of
Kenya that have a lot of water and parts without. There are parts
of the Sahel that have got quite a lot of water, and then parts
without.
But there are trans-boundary water disasters in sub-Saharan Africa,
as you find elsewhere. Lake Chad, in a way, is Africa's Aral sea
[shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakstan]. It has shrunk to something
like half of its 1970 parameters, and that's really a consequence
of countries not negotiating how to manage a shared water resource.
You've got Nigeria building big irrigation schemes, which has
drained it, and Chad itself, which has diverted large amounts of
water from it. It's a classical example - if you don't negotiate
and come up with a shared solution, in the end everybody loses.
You have to look at how the water is used. I think I'm right in
saying irrigation would be one of the major uses of water from Lake
Chad, or from river sources feeding into Lake Chad. By and large,
these are enormously inefficient systems, because they haven't been
maintained - the investment hasn't been there. So there's a loss of
water. In a lot of cases, the irrigation systems themselves were
not properly designed, so you get saturation and flooding, which
lead to problems with sanitation. That reduces the productivity of
the irrigation system.
As with any problem of scarcity, you have to ask how efficiently
the resource is being used? And it's very interesting. In most of
the world, irrigation systems are far more productive then rain-fed
systems. In a lot of sub-Saharan Africa, you find the opposite. The
people who are producing in floodplains are very, very efficient
producers. Parts of the Sahel do have very good irrigation systems,
but around Lake Chad, those systems are notoriously inefficient,
which, again, is why it's not only a scarcity issue.
The analogy I often draw about scarcity is that if you ask people,
"What is it that you mean by scarcity?" they say, "Well, it's in
short supply." If you ask what they mean by short supply, they say,
"People want more water than there is available." To which my
response is: well, if I open a garage selling Porsche cars for
2,000 dollars, Porsche cars will be in short supply. It's the same
way with water. If you treat it like it's a completely infinite
resource - you don't price it properly, you don't manage it
properly - it's in short supply. A lot of scarcity is manufactured
scarcity - the result of poor governance.
Prescriptions
The report is in two sections. There is "Water for Life" - the
water in peoples' houses for drinking, sanitation - and "Water for
Livelihood", which is how you manage water as an environmental
resource. In the Water for Life part of the equation, we say this
is one of the great development challenges facing Sub-Saharan
Africa. If you look at the research we did in-house, we show that
just introducing clean water into a household or providing
sanitation in the household can reduce the risk of childhood death
by something like 40 per cent.
We say governments need to legislate for water as a human right,
and they need to mean it. Don't just put it in the constitution;
legislate for it. South Africa has made it a right of citizenship
that water providers have to provide everybody with 40 liters of
water free. They have been progressing towards that, and there are
huge debates about it in South Africa - whether to do it public or
private. But at least they're moving in the right direction, and at
least there's a debate about it. In most countries, there's not
even a debate about it.
We also say governments should be spending around one per cent of
GDP on developing water and sanitation systems in rural areas and
in urban areas, which doesn't sound like a lot. But the current
average is probably about 0.2 or 0.3 per cent. And then you get the
question, "Is it affordable?" Well, if you compare it with military
spending in a lot of countries, it's a tiny part of the military
budget. Ethiopia spends maybe 20 times more on the military than it
does on water and sanitation. You'd have to ask where the biggest
risk for the average Ethiopian comes from. It's actually water and
sanitation.
We then argue that even if you had African governments moving in
the right direction, which some of them are trying to do through
national policy towards water, there's a financial constraint.
That constraint is partly because aid donors haven't prioritized
water very much at all. So we argue that aid donors ought to double
their commitment to water, which means about $4 billion per year
increase, and most of that should go to sub-Saharan Africa.
And then finally, we say that we need a global action plan - that
you can't leave this to individual governments to resolve, because
the problem is too big, and you can't assume the individual aid
donors that you've got in-county are going to provide the critical
mass of support. So, the same way that we have a global strategy
for HIV/Aids, we argue that you need one for water and sanitation.
A big part of what we're arguing for in the report is for the G8,
the World Bank, the IMF to take up this idea of a global action
plan for water and sanitation, which I think would make a real
difference in Africa. That's the prescriptive side on that story.
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