Water Mismanagement Plagues the World's Poor

Companies, governments, and interest groups need to learn how to work together to supply the needy with clean, properly distributed water

By Kevin Ferguson

Several of the 4,500 residents of the Sudampuri settlement in Delhi. Water is delivered every few days by tanker, but gets scarce in the summer. About 4 million people in Delhi live in such settlements Kevin Ferguson

Outside the World Water Forum in Istanbul last week, a sea of white-helmeted, truncheon-wielding Turkish police tear-gassed and manhandled 100 chanting demonstrators. Inside the halls, activists quickly made hay of their brutal mistreatment, citing it as another example of collusion between government and business to use privatization contracts to deny the world's poorest residents access to clean water and basic sanitation.

Throughout the conference much ire was directed at the privatization of utilities. Some of it was justified. But antiprivatization protesters also misrepresented some things that have led to problems in the world's water management.

The failure of developing world governments to prioritize clean water has unquestionably contributed to many ills. Understanding what has led to the failure of some public and private partnerships can help ensure that governments, private companies, and nongovernmental organizations work better together in the future.

No Tap Water for Three Billion People

Privatization was a hot topic at the Water Forum, a triennial event that this year drew 27,000 water and sanitation bureaucrats, hydrologists, people from nongovernmental organizations, and hundreds of vendors hawking portable toilets, low-cost water purifiers, and high-priced consulting services. All were looking to address a global humanitarian disaster that poses great market opportunities.

At least 2.6 billion people have no access to a toilet. Half of them are forced to defecate in the open, fouling their own drinking water, according to the Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative Council. About 3 billion people—nearly half the world's population—have no tap water and must lug heavy jugs of water miles to their homes every day. Even then the water is often contaminated with industrial pollutants or teeming with pathogens.

The result is breathtaking. Of children who die before their fifth birthday in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, and other developing countries, 17% do so from preventable water-borne diseases, typically succumbing to dehydration from diarrhea. That's a death rate greater than those for malaria and AIDS, according to the World Health Organization.

Mexico's Private Sector Shares Costs

Privatization is hardly the main culprit. Even the term itself is misleading. With a few high-profile exceptions, most water sources aren't owned by private companies, such as Evian bottler Danone. And private contracts usually transfer ownership of pipes, treatment plants, and holding tanks to public entities.

Mexico's Ministry of the Environment & Natural Resources, for example, will retain ownership of one of the world's largest wastewater treatment plants in Tula, near Mexico City, when a private contractor completes it in 2012. Mexico, which has doubled its annual water and sanitation budget to $3 billion since 2006, says an additional $3 billion is spent annually by the private sector on water and sanitation projects. "The private sector is very important for water and sanitation in Mexico," says Jose Luis Luege, director general of the country's National Water Commission. "It brings better efficiencies that would not be possible otherwise."

That point is often lost on activists, concedes Canadian antiprivatization leader Maude Barlow. One reason may be that Barlow—in her frequent public skewering of French water distributor Suez Environnement and other multinationals—calls for their removal from the public water business.