Water and sanitation for everyone is tenable

The 2015 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate, Mr Rajendra Singh at the official World Water Day celebration in India on March 20, 2015. PHOTO: COURTESY

Since 1990, Stockholm has, without fail, hosted an annual water pilgrimage bringing together policy makers, water experts, businesses, researchers, scholars, parliamentarians, innovators and thinkers in the water sector.

Unremittingly, this annual event has continued to generate fresh ideas as it unveils reformist innovations year after year, while introducing perspectives on water that influence research trends as well as the quality and outlook of water governance and diplomacy globally.

One would be forgiven for imagining that Stockholm hosts the annual Water Week because of weighty challenges the city or Sweden as a country suffers regarding water. Absolutely not! On the contrary, Stockholm is one of the few world capitals with a superior and much-praised water-cleaning regime globally. Participants of the Water Week, for instance, are provided with a bottle with which to fetch drinking water from taps.

Last year’s was the Silver Jubilee edition of the Stockholm International World Water Week (SIWI). According to conference organisers, “... in 2015, over 3,300 individuals and close to 300 organisations from 130 countries participated in the Week.”

SIWI 2016 that concluded on Friday 2, September 2016 was themed, “Water for Sustainable Development.” Its focus was couched to deliberately resonate with Sustainable Development Goal Number Six; one of the 17 SDGs unveiled by the UN towards the end of 2015. The sixth SDG specifically seeks to “ensure access to water and sanitation for all.”

Besides Number Six, the majority of the rest of the other SDGs have something or other to do with water in varying degrees. That SDG Number Six focuses exclusively on water and sanitation is sufficient testimony that it is no longer tenable to leave issues of broader water governance to cursory coordination or peradventure. Previously, the pursuit for clean water easily overrode other priorities such as sanitation, hygiene, waste disposal, depletion of forest cover, environmental pollution and so on. Indeed, not too long ago, matters sanitation in Kenya — and I believe most of Africa — it may seem, were merely an afterthought to many a planner and policy maker.

Thankfully, continuous awareness creation has, finally, exposed the entwined relationship between water and sanitation and water and other social and environmental realities. Gradual vanishing of the stigma that often attended to the very thought of addressing topics such as “open defecation” in policy-bound forums sometime back has, in recent years, opened the door to profitable address of disposal of human and animal waste. As a result, there is greater hope of reduced fatalities from ailments associated with poor sanitation and hygiene.

The future of water governance, apparently, demands a lot more than merely acknowledging the interconnectedness of the array of factors that determine the provision of clean water to unreached or underserved populations. It calls for more than just the installation of efficient sanitation systems. Beyond such preliminary concerns are major issues that need to be addressed side by side with water and sanitation.

What source of energy for pumping water, for instance, makes most sense for neighbourhoods whose residents earn less than two dollars a day? What technologies fit in well with efficient crop irrigation? How effective are water regulatory regimes with regard to the delivery of SDG Number Six? What is the relationship between water availability and climate change? How does the Paris Agreement of December 2015 inspire the achievement of SDG Number Six? And to what extend is water viewed by key policy makers as an enabler of economic activities or employment as espoused by the UN?

These and a raft of other relevant questions demand that global water and sanitation predicaments be addressed side by side and closely with other crucial concerns. The range of topics that dominated key sessions and plenary engagements at SIWI 2016 laid the ground for a more concerted approach in seeking solutions to matters concerning water and sanitation.

As UNESCO’s Special Envoy for Water in Africa, former President Mwai Kibaki is broadly expected to enthuse the continent to embrace more progressive water management, governance and diplomacy.

His mission is likely to bear more fruits faster if Africa recognises the need to embrace the nexus approach to water and sanitation management as hugely propounded at SIWI 2016.

What the nexus approach to water governance essentially calls for, therefore, is expansion of sector representation and participating expertise in future discourses that seek to deliver water and sanitation for all by 2030.