No 77 October 2007.5
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No 77 October 2007.5
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A glass
of water could tell a whole story. Like the glass Dunstan Ddamulira was offered
recently in the Ugandan countryside. "In my country [Uganda]," Ddamulira
says, "you can't be refused water to drink. So I stopped by at this house
and asked for a glass of water. A girl gave it to me. It was 50 percent mud."
And to prove what he says, he shows a picture he took with his cell phone. It
is 50 percent mud.
That glass of muddy water was offered to Ddamulira
in Bijaba, a village of some 150 families in central Uganda. The village is
on the top of a hill. In the rainy season, villagers must fetch water from a
water hole they dug to collect run-off rainwater. In the dry season, they must
go to a valley some eight kilometres away to find water.
What Bijaba's villagers have to go through is
a daily experience for some 1,1 billion people on this planet. They do not have
access to sufficient, or safe, water to drink and to satisfy their domestic
needs. As a consequence of this and of the lack of adequate sanitation, about
2 million people die every year. Most of them are children.
Many more people suffer on a daily basis from
the lack of water. The lack means that, in some countries, meeting the family
water needs can take five hours of work per day - and women and girls will be
those shouldering most of this burden. And of course, there are also the water-related
diseases, and the hindrance to education that goes hand in hand with sickness
and the efforts involved in fetching water.
More than 80% of the people affected by the dearth
of water live in rural areas. Two-thirds of them are in Asia. Over 40% of the
population of sub-Saharan Africa falls within this group. As with many other
situations of injustice, exploitation and deprivation, the poorest are those
most affected. "The lack of water pushes people into the vicious cycle
of poverty," Ddamulira says.
Tackling
the causes
Why this situation? "In Uganda," says
Ddamulira, "there is a combination of factors: insufficient funding, uneven
distribution, lack of technology appropriate to rural areas, government corruption."
He works with the Agency for Cooperation and Research for Development, which
supports water supply and sanitation projects, in addition to awareness-raising
and training, with a focus on women.
For Moshe Tsehlo from Lesotho, the question of
governance is one of the major root causes. In his country, five dams allow
the government to sell water to South Africa. What happens to the income produced
is a mystery, he says, due to the government's lack of transparency. While the
water sources are in rural areas, the latter are not a government priority when
it comes to water supply. As a consequence, subsistence agriculture suffers
because of the lack of irrigation, and the affected people migrate from villages
to cities.
Tsehlo is Lesotho's coordinator of Participatory
Ecological Land Use Management, an organization that works on advocacy as well
as on supporting small water collection, irrigation and bottling projects. "At
the national level, our advocacy aims to amend the constitution so as to include
access to water as a human right," he says. "We need the legal framework
to block the privatization of water in our country," he adds.
Ddamulira and Tsehlo were participating in the
20-25 January World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. So were their partners:
representatives Danuta Sacher, head of the policy and campaigns department at
Bread for the World (Germany), and Asa Elfstrom, senior advisor on water and
development of the Church of Sweden.
For Sacher, the water plight of so many people
around the world is a clear expression of the way the poor are marginalized.
"Governments don't care for the poor. Neither do they care for the long-term
water cycle," she says. "They are only able to look at the issue with
business eyes, and miss the full picture."
Sacher's organization has been campaigning for
the right to water for the past four years, and she doesn't hesitate to point
a finger at the World Bank. "Due to its influence on the definition of
national policies and its message hailing privatization as 'the' solution, we
have lost perhaps ten years," she asserts.
For the Church of Sweden, which works with partners
on three continents and some 30 countries, the water issue will be a priority
for the next three years, says Elfstrom. This year it will be the subject of
the church's fund-raising campaign during Lent.
Speaking
out ecumenically
The four organizations represented by Ddamulira,
Tsehlo, Sacher and Elfstrom are members of the Ecumenical Water Network (EWN),
an initiative hosted by the World Council of Churches (WCC).
The EWN is part of the 2007 global ecumenical
coalition at the WSF, also led by the WCC. The network brings together concerned
churches, organizations and movements which have joined efforts to protect and
implement people's right to access water around the world, and to make sure
that a common Christian witness on water issues is heard in the global debate.
It promotes community-based initiatives and solutions,
and advocates for water to be considered a human right in addition to being
a gift of God. It also seeks to raise the awareness of the churches on the urgency
of the concern.
Among the many ideas that the EWN's organizations
are bringing home from Nairobi is a proposal to document cases of violations
of the right to water. They are also inviting other organizations to join a
"Blue October" initiative by campaigning for water rights - each organization
with its own focus - for a week in October.
It is "right to speak out and to act when
the life-giving water is pervasively and systematically under threat,"
a WCC Assembly statement, "Water for Life", said last year. WSF participants
are doing just that.
By Juan Michel (*)
(*) Juan Michel,
WCC media relations officer, is a member of the Evangelical Church of the River
Plate in Buenos Aires, Argentina.