Providing safe drinking water for the poor

Reducing inequality of access to water
Providing the poor with access to fresh water and sanitation
Improving fresh water supply to those in poverty

Context

Faulty policies and vested market interests have conspired to deny the poor access to safe drinking water. The poor very often pay more for water than the rich through informal, often unsafe, supplies. For example, in Nairobi, Kenya, residents of informal settlements pay water vendors 5 to 10 times more per unit of water than what other residents pay to the city authorities. This is a common pattern in many cities in developing countries.

The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development includes a commitment "to build a humane, equitable and caring global society cognisant of the need for human dignity for all". The global community committed itself to halve by 2015 the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water. According to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF in the "Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report", just 82 per cent of the population of the world have clean drinking water.

Claim

Much of Asia's water supply was unaccounted for, leading to low coverage of formal water services and a large informal market. With such large informal markets come vested interests not to improve water services. Many water policies do not facilitate expansion of water services naming high connection charges, low tariffs, poor billing and inadequate collection services as examples.