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Updated Friday, March 19, 2010 10:07 am TWN, By Caroline Boin, Special to The China Post

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Legalizing the work of water vendors a priority

The eighteenth annual World Water Day offers the same old problems and rejects the practical solutions. On March 22, one billion people will, as usual, spend the day without clean water and a third of humanity without adequate sanitation. As usual, some three and a half million men, women and children will die from related diseases this year. Yet many NGOs and politicians still prefer ideology to ideas, spurning what the private sector delivers to the world's poor.

Activists often claim to be defending the poor from profit-maximizing corporations. But this has more to do with dogma than reality. Given that less than 10% of world water management is private, it is hard to see how they can blame corporations for poor supply.

In fact, it is governments that mismanage water and misallocate it to political cronies and powerful lobbies such as farmers. The poor, in rural areas or slums, are left unconnected and unable to do much about it. Anti-privatization groups keep repeating that water should be provided by government but ignore that government has been the worst enemy of the poor.

On another tack, the World Development Movement and similar groups claim that the private sector has done little for the poor, having connected only three million people in developing countries over the past 15 years. But this figure excludes Latin America and South-East Asia where private water management — and the number of people getting water — has boomed since the 1990s. In Argentina, for example, privately-managed areas got lower water prices, more connections and a drop in infectious diseases and child deaths.

Activists have further misrepresented private supply by focusing on multinationals while ignoring the small-scale water vendors who get water to people whom governments have abandoned. In many African cities, they sell plastic water sachets to passers-by, while in Paraguay 500 aguateros supply nearly half a million people using tankers and piped water.

A World Bank researcher found in 1998 that “in most cities in developing countries, more than half the population gets basic water service from suppliers other than the incumbent official utility.” Country surveys suggest that the situation has changed litle since then.

The World Health Organization, like activists, disregards these “informal” water vendors, bottled water and tankers. It refuses to consider them as “improved water sources” as they are unregulated, unpredictable and allegedly incapable of serving a mass market.

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