This week the Joint Monitoring Program of the United Nations announced that the MDG for water supply has been reached, most likely already somewhere in 2010. 5 years ahead of the deadline the percentage of the World’s population without access to safe water supplies has been halved. This is no mean feat and would be a cause for celebration. Yet, the report in which this was announced as well as the various comments on it, have been fairly cautious in tone and celebrations of this achievement have been mooted. Does this mean that the predominant view is that the glass is half empty, and not half full? Or, are there big reasons of concern around the filling of the other half of the glass?
Published on: 09/03/2012
Let’s have a look at some of the figures. Between 1990 and 2010 over 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources, equivalent to some 275.000 persons per day! In this way, the percentage of the World population without access has been reduced from 24% to 11%. In absolute numbers, this increase is largely due to the great progress made in China and India, both countries with large populations. But also in relative terms, most progress was made in the various Asian sub-regions. Although Sub-Saharan Africa increased its access with a very reasonable 12 percentage-point, its low starting point made that this region is largely off-track to meet the MDGs and it is the region where access to water remains lowest at around 61%. Of the two billion people gaining access, 1.2 billion did so in urban areas, and the remaining 800 million in rural areas. For the urban areas, this meant basically that efforts to increase access managed to keep pace with population growth, as the relative level of access remained stable around 95%. But for rural areas it meant an increase in access from 62 to 81%. All this points to the glass being half full. In urban areas, the provision of access has managed for 20 years to keep pace with population growth and there is no reason why this shouldn’t be the case in the future. And in rural areas, there is steady progress to reaching good levels of coverage.
So what are the cautionary remarks why some consider the glass to be half empty? First and foremost, actual services that people receive are often sub-standard. Though the JMP increasingly relies on user surveys to find out the service that people actually receive, this doesn’t capture all the details. In many cases, the actually received service is below the standard of the JMP or of national norms and standards. Recent work in Colombia showed that half of the systems had service levels below the benchmark standard for example because of water quality problems. Similar research in Ghana showed that a majority of people received sub-standard services. If this factor is taken into account, the coverage figures are much lower than portrayed in the JMP report.
Moreover, the cautionary remarks refer to the possibility of achieving universal coverage, as also UN Permanent Secretary states in his preface. Filling the other half of the glass will be more difficult because of the following reasons:
Though the glass may be considered half full, filling it to the top will become more and more difficult. This does require us to issue words of caution of the trends in access to water supply. However, let’s also take the opportunity to celebrate the achievement of reaching the second of the MDGs. Please raise your glasses (of water) for a toast: cheers! And for more discussion on the report, see this video where Patrick Moriarty and others are interviewed on Al Jazeera to comment on the report:
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