It Is My Great Honour and Privilege to Be Present Here This Morning and to Address This

WATER AND SANITATION FOR ALL

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

4th WORLD WATER FORUM, MEXICO CITY 10.00 A.M. SUNDAY 19 MARCH 2006

ANNA K. TIBAIJUKA UNDER-SECRETARY-GENERAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR UN-HABITAT

His Excellency President Vicente Fox Quezada President of the 4th world Water Forum,

Mr. Cristobal Jaime Jaquez Co-President of the 4th World Water Fourm,

Mr. Loic Fauchon Co-President of the 4th World Water Forum,

Mr. Cesar Herrera Secretary General, 4th World Water Forum,

Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is my great honour and privilege to be present here this morning and to address this august gathering at the fourth World Water Forum here in Mexico City.

My congratulations to His Excellency President Vicente Fox Quezada for his personal leadership and to the myriad officials of the Mexican Government for their great efforts to make this Forum a great success.

1 I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate an outstanding personality of Mexico, Mr. Angel Gurria, the former Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs of Mexico, for his appointment as the next head of the OECD. This honour is a tribute not only to his personal qualities and the global respect he has earned, but also to the country as well. More recently, I have known him as the Chair for the Task Force on Financing Water and Sanitation for All, which issued a valuable report on the work of the Task Force yesterday.

I am truly glad to see that, over the years, the World Water Council has made the World Water Forum a unique platform for the global water community, giving an opportunity to all development partners: communities, women and youth groups, governments and the private sector to come together every three years to share inspiration and experiences of their common effort to make this planet earth a better place to live:

 a place where all can access safe water and basic sanitation – the vital life sustaining services that could protect their health and improve their productivity;  a place where 2 million children would not die, needlessly every year, or some 80 children would not die in the 20 minutes I speak here today, for the lack of safe water or for its poor quality;  a place where millions of girl children would not be forced to trade education for collecting water, or drop out from school for the lack of even minimal sanitation facilities;  a place where one billion people would not live in slums, denied of privacy, safety and dignity in their daily struggle to access safe water and basic sanitation.

It is also heartening to see that the Forum is giving increasing attention to action to make this happen. I recall that the last World Water Forum in Japan gave attention to commitments and partnerships. By the end of the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto, an impressive array of concrete actions were committed by the international community. I am pleased to report to you that UN-HABITAT and the Asian Development Bank has worked together over the past three years to bring $300 million in new investments in water and sanitation for the poor in Asian countries, fulfilling in good measure the commitment made at the 3rd Water Forum to bring at least 500 million over five years

It gives me great satisfaction that the Fourth Forum, here in Mexico, has focused on local actions and experiences. For, I am convinced that the Goals and Action Plans will not, by themselves, change the lives of the people, more particularly of the poor, unless we ground our interventions into the reality of location. The struggle for achieving the MDGs will have to be waged in our cities, towns and villages, where water is consumed and wastes generated. It is at the local level that conflicts have to be resolved and consensus found among competing interests and parties. The MDGs can not be delivered in orbit but only in a defined space. It is at the level of shelter and settlements that the two targets: 10 and 11 of Millennium Development Goal come together and will have to be delivered together.

2 It is for this reason, the political declaration adopted by the Heads of States at the World Summit in Johannesburg amplified W in WEHAB to stand for Water, Sanitation and Shelter, providing the thematic focus for deliberations at the 12th and 13th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development.

Mr. Chairman, Excellencies, Distinguished Guests,

I would now like to turn to some of the key challenges that need the attention of this Forum and obstacles that impede harnessing the energy of local action.

Urbanization: A core public issue in gross negelct

I fully agree with the Millennium Task Force that some of the Goals are not being met simply because policy-makers are unaware of the challenges, unaware of what to do, or neglectful of core public issues. The urban challenge is a case in point.

In 2001, 47 per cent of the world’s population was located in urban areas. This figure will rise to 50 per cent by 2007. It is projected that by the year 2030, two-thirds of humanity will be living in urban areas. This demographic transition, which is largely irreversible, is yet to appear in the planning horizon of many policy-makers, particularly in the development community.

I am indeed gratified that the Commission for Africa commissioned by Prime Minister Blair has identified urbanization as a key challenge in its report.

I always encourage visiting delegations to Nairobi to make a tour of Kibera, Africa’s largest slum settlement with 750,000 people condemned to live on only 420 hectres of land. Official statistics often disguise the real problem of the poor in such challenging situation. For example, in Kenya, the official statistics show that 96 per cent of the urban residents have access to ‘improved’ sanitation. A reality check can give a very different picture. A recent UN-HABITAT assessment of water and sanitation situation in the world’s cities indicate that in many slums, 150 or more inhabitants daily queue up for one public toilet. A slum dweller in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, forced to rely on private water vendors, pays 5 to 7 times more for a litre of water than an average North American citizen. The health and economic impacts of these service deficiencies can be very costly to a country in the long run.

UN-HABITAT and the World Bank are working together through the Cities Alliance to put urban poverty and slums on the international agenda.

Women today constitute 70 per cent of the world’s absolute poor and pay a heavy price in procuring this life-sustaining commodity for their families through daily drudgery and lost opportunities. In crowded urban settlements, sanitation can be far more than a public health issue for a girl: it determines her privacy and dignity; it determines whether her potential to become a productive citizen in society will ever be fulfilled. It is no surprise

3 that during a recent survey of slums, we were told by a woman that she would not give her daughter in marriage to a house without a toilet.

The Governance Crisis

The current water and sanitation crisis is increasingly viewed as a crisis of governance rather than a crisis of scarcity. Increasing donor dependence, the lack of aid-effectiveness due to rampant corruption, the absence of trust between communities and public authorities, the lack of motivation to pay for public services, are all pointers to this crisis which ultimately affect service delivery and its sustainability.

We need sound policies and the political will to back them up; strengthened institutions and trained managers to run them; a responsible private sector and an enlightened public sector to work hand in hand; and finally, informed public opinion and active participation of communities to draw upon the vast resources of the civil society. In short, we need good governance that can draw upon the best both from public and private sectors as also from communities. The experience of UN-HABITAT’s global campaign on Good Urban Governance shows that much of the innovation in good governance at national and local levels came from countries where democracy has been strengthened.

We Need National and International Mentors for Local Action

Successful local actions need an enabling policy environment at national level. The Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSPs) developed at country level needs to reflect the MDGs and prioritize water, sanitation and shelter, as a first step. This is an important pre- requisite to enhancing flow of budgetary resources to water, sanitation and human settlements. PRSPs should also support and provide for incentives for building partnerships for local action. Community-led initiatives in the water and sanitation sector have seen remarkable progress in several countries in recent years. Several of these initiatives are led by women’s groups who are, truly, acting as agents of change. The challenge in this area is to evaluate these experiences and to find ways of up-scaling them in partnership with local governments.

I would urge donors – be they bilaterals or multilaterals - to look more closely at some of the promising, locally funded, community-driven, initiatives which have produced scaled-up, city-wide improvements in water and sanitation services, by working in partnership with local governments. There is immense opportunity for mobilizing yet untapped local resources through innovative partnerships of this kind which could result in better care for the investment and a greater willingness to pay for the services.

Investment in water and sanitation: We Need More, We Need Better

The 2005 World Summit, concluded a little over a week ago (16 September 2005), has called for greater direct investment in developing countries in health, clean water, sanitation and housing, among others. The Summit has also reaffirmed the commitment of the world leaders to address the special needs of Africa, which is the only continent

4 not on track to meet any of the goals of the MDG by 2015. This will require that polices, including bilateral and multi-lateral development aid policies, will have to be put in place to support the efforts of developing countries, and Africa in particular, to reach the related internationally agreed goals and targets.

The recent trend of donor flows, however, gives quite a different picture. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee reported in 2000 that only 1.7 per cent of all sector- allocable aid was earmarked for low-cost water and sanitation. A recent analysis of donor flows to water supply and sanitation, commissioned by UN-HABITAT indicates that in Sub-Saharan Africa, average funding to the water supply and sanitation sector actually declined between 1999 and 2003, both in absolute and in percentage terms. The education sector received on average, nearly three times as much in ODA commitments than the water and sanitation sector; the health sector received nearly twice as much.

The time has, clearly, come for a review of the current approach by the bilateral and multilateral development agencies and the development financing institutions, and realigning their priorities with the expressed commitments of the World leaders.

I am pleased to announce in this context that I have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with President Donald Kaberuka of the African Development Bank to bring more than $200 million in grants and more than $350 million in loans to African cities and towns over the next five years. UN-HABITAT’s Water and Sanitation Trust Fund and the African Water Facility will work together in the implementation of this MOU. I applaud the confidence reposed on my agency by the donors, notably, the Canada Fund for Africa, the Governments of the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Need for Quick Impact Initiatives

The World leaders at the 2005 World Summit emphasized on the need for Quick-impact Initiatives, and “resolved to identify and implement country-led initiatives with adequate international support”. UN-HABITAT is currently engaged in a model-setting exercise for such quick-impact initiatives in the Lake Victoria region in Africa and in the Greater Mekong region in South East Asia. These initiatives focus on the growing numbers of poor communities in secondary towns and strive to achieve MDG in these towns within a span of 3 to 4 years.

I hope the deliberations here today will give attention to the needs of similar initiatives elsewhere that could promise immediate and durable improvements in the lives of the people and a renewed hope for the achievement of the development goals.

Capture Unheard Voices of People

Improving the flow of information is critical for increasing programme effectiveness. We need to invest more in monitoring processes and encourage results-based planning and management. The challenge here is to develop a monitoring mechanism that reflects the voices of the people, particularly of the poor communities, who are the real targets of

5 MDGs. We can not measure progress successfully unless we use the lens of the target groups – the poorest. UN-HABITAT has developed participatory monitoring processes over the years and we will be pleased to bring this experience into investment projects through our partnerships with the regional development banks.

To conclude, I applaud the organizers and the host of this Forum once again for bringing the global water community here to focus on local action, which is central to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. I wish the deliberations a great success.

Thank you for your time and attention.