Power, Water and Money: Exploring the Nexus

Providing safe and clean water to communities is not exactly rocket science: the basic technologies and engineering principles are known and mastered (although there is always scope for improvement of course), management systems understood, aquatic bio-chemical and physical processes well comprehended. Despite the relative technological and managerial ease of providing clean water for all and of evacuating and treating wastewater, it is remarkable that more than one billion people worldwide are still suffering from inadequate, unreliable (both in quantity and quality) and/or difficult access to clean water and almost two billion form unsatisfactory sanitation. While the humanitarian and socio-economic costs of inadequate water and sanitation services are well known, progress in alleviating water problems remains excruciatingly and unacceptably slow. The annual number of premature deaths or the persistence of debilitating conditions actually suffered by the poor of the world as a result of inadequate water supply far outweigh even the most pessimistic predictions of the human consequences of global warming. Yet, it would be remarkably easy to remedy this. With the possible exception of very arid regions, conditions of problematic water access have little, if anything at all, to do with water availability or absolute scarcity. It usually is a problem of access and equitable distribution of the available resources. What need to be understood better, therefore, is not how to bring water to people, but, rather, why it is that some social groups do not have adequate access to water and sanitation, while others do.