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Water and Poverty Workshop calls for move from talk to action

DHAKA, Bangladesh, 26 September 2002 -- Addressing the water security needs of the poor is a top priority in water management and there is an urgent need to focus on actions that put this into practice. This was the main conclusion of a major regional consultation workshop held here over the past four days that brought together over 250 senior representatives of government, civil society and the private sector.

The meeting was organized by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Bangladesh's Water Resources Planning Organization (WARPO) and BRAC, a leading poverty-focused nongovernmental organization (NGO), and supported by the Governments of the Netherlands and Denmark, and the Japan Water Resources Association. It comes just three weeks after delegates at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg reaffirmed their commitment to cut by half the number of people in the world with inadequate clean water and sanitation by the year 2015 and is a milestone event in the run-up to the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto in March 2003.

While different perspectives were expressed at the workshop, there was broad agreement on a series of measures that must be taken to ensure that continual rounds of discussion now be translated into action. These include:

• Implementation of existing policies. Making changes to the policy process to ensure the implementation of existing policies is a key to the move to action. New policy initiatives should only be considered where there are clear gaps in existing provisions.

• Ensure the most basic needs of the poor, for life and livelihoods, are met. This is more than just water for health and dignity: it must also include water for food security and adequate nutrition and water as an input into sustaining livelihoods. The full range of needs and uses of water, including domestic water supplies used for productive activities and the water needed to sustain ecosystem integrity, must be defined and included in pro-poor water actions.

• Better targeting of actions to the needs, priorities and capabilities of the poor. There is a need to demonstrate that the specific measures taken will be targeted to improving the water security of the poor. Approaches should be demand-led, where the poor themselves set the agenda and define the priorities.

• Focus on the achievable. Grand master plans to address all the needs of all the poor were felt to be self-defeating and take too long to develop and be agreed and should be avoided.

• Partnerships are a key to success. All stakeholders have a role to play in providing for the water needs of the poor.

• Focus on opportunities rather than problems created by water. Water should be seen as a positive contribution to poverty reduction and improving water security rather than just the source of ill-health and social alienation that are key parts of poverty. Better access to water will improve the productivity of existing production and make many new livelihood opportunities possible. Improvements to water management can be a ladder out of poverty.

• Well planned investments are a core component of required actions. This should include large infrastructure as well as small, localised investments. The process of investment decision-making must be improved. The key is to consider all options, to plan, implement and operate infrastructure in different ways and to ensure benefit flows reach the poor.

Delegates to the meeting agreed that, while there should be a move to action now, a number of factors were identified that are fundamental requirements if these actions are to be effective.

The first essential condition for success is that there has to be a concerted political will to make changes to water management. Improving the access of the poor to water resources may challenge the interests of powerful vested groups who benefit from existing forms of management and it may require substantial investments of money, institutional capacities and other resources that have to be diverted from other areas. The willingness to tackle powerful interests and to invest will only be available where an extremely strong case is made that these efforts are more important than other priorities.

Transparency of information and shared understanding are essential for creating partnerships and harmonizing the potentials of different stakeholders to the common purpose of improving the water security of the poor. It is also a key to wise decision-making and building capacities. This information should above all be available to poor people in a form that they can understand and that is appropriate to their particular situation.

The poor themselves must be key actors in all stages of pro-poor water management processes. Participation is an agreed mechanism and is enshrined in many policies. While not everyone can, or will want to, participate in every decision, representative mechanisms must be available so that the needs, interests and priorities of the poor are clearly and forcefully articulated. Where such representative mechanisms do not exist, measures to create them are themselves a key objective of the process of pro-poor water actions. Equity, with a gender focus, is the core of the approach, both as an objective and as a key element of the methodology. This means that it is not something that should be an 'add-on' but should rather be mainstreamed into policies, procedures and actions.

There is a need for changed attitudes. The poor should not be seen as victims or part of the problem, but recognized as creative adapters and the basis of the solution. At present, the poor are too often patronized even where they are involved. It needs to be recognized that the poor are often ingenious and creative in making the most of the few resources that they possess. They also have an intimate knowledge of local problems and opportunities that are the basis for defining locally appropriate interventions. This adaptive creativity has enormous potential and any actions must be structured to make best use of it.

It was concluded that the approach will be demand-led, with initially no assumptions about what problems and opportunities exist. The goal is to give poor women and men greater choices and the means and capacities to make these choices work. The key to success will be to develop institutional capacities through which different needs and options can be identified and turned into practical steps for implementation. This means that flexibility is a key characteristic of the approaches that should be developed.

Radical innovations are not needed in most cases. The challenge is to scale up what is already know to work at more local levels. This in turn means a strong focus on the institutional processes and capacity building through which scaling up can take place and sustainability ensured.

The agenda for the meeting was set during the opening ceremonies when Myoung-Ho Shin, Vice-President, Asian Development Bank, told delegates that "We can no longer think of poverty as simply an income of less than a dollar a day. Poor health and an inadequate diet, vulnerability to disasters or violence, poor access to basic services, few or no prospects for improvement in this or the next generation - all of these are expressions of poverty, and must be addressed in our policies and programs."