There are three great scourges among the developing world poor: malnutrition, anemia, and dysentery. The last is usually a result of unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation. In fact, over 80 percent of all of the disease in the world comes from contaminated water and lack of sanitation. Dysentery and other waterborne diseases kill more people each year than all forms of violence combined, including war. The largest single killer of children is waterborne disease. Over 1.8 million children will die this year from them. Thirty-five children will die while you’re reading this article.
According to World Vision, a faith-based humanitarian organization that has been in the anti-poverty business since the 1950s, the countries with the worst water poor problems are: Eritrea, where 80.7 percent of the people lack basic water service; Papua New Guinea, with 63.4 percent; Uganda, 61.1 percent; Ethiopia, 60.9 percent; Somalia, 60 percent; Angola, 59 percent; the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 58.2 percent; Chad, 57.5 percent; Niger, 54.2 percent; and, Mozambique, with 52.7 percent of its people without basic water.
In 2015, the plight of the water poor finally made it on the public agenda in a big way. The UN General Assembly adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The purpose of these goals is to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” Water and sanitation became SDG 6. The official wording maintains the goal is to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.”
In adopting the resolution for SDG 6, the UN set six specific targets for nations to act on. Target number one is for nations to provide “safe and affordable drinking water.” Target three is to “improve water quality, wastewater treatment, and safe use.”
The UN has actually been in the water poor business since 1977, when the world body convened a conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and declared the 1980s to be the International Drinking Water Decade. Unfortunately, the UN’s efforts did little more then shed some modest light on a very dire situation.
Estimates of the global number of water poor vary somewhat, but all are very large. In 2017, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs calculated that “2.2 billion people lacked safely managed drinking water and 4.2 billion people lacked safely managed sanitation.” According to statistics published by the Centers for Disease Control in 2019, almost 900 million people across the globe have no access to safe drinking water. At the same time, CDC estimates that more than 2 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation service. Whether you use either the UN’s numbers or CDC’s, an enormous amount of water poor are suffering across the globe.
A few summers ago, a young woman went to Honduras on a church-run trip to an orphanage they ran there. When she returned she described how the children were constantly getting sick from the water they drank. So, some water people went down to the orphanage to see. And, yes, the water was alive. Now, this wasn’t in some remote village. It was in the national capital of Tegucigalpa. The children were drinking piped-in city water. So, $10,000-plus later, a water treatment system was installed at the orphanage. No more diarrhea and dysentery. The orphanage, which was spending $400 a month on bottled water that they vainly tried to get the children to drink, was able to spend instead on a doctor visit, twice a month, to look after the kids.
In urban slums, even in major cities like Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro, and in rural areas throughout the developing world, you can take a drop of local drinking water, put it under a handheld microscope, and you will see living water. There are all kinds of nasty things swimming in that drop. Just as at the orphanage, the water is very much alive.
Fixing a living water problem at an orphanage in Honduras is relatively easy. What about a whole country? Bringing safe drinking water to a country, or even just a town or village, is largely about money. But it is about more than money too.
First of all, it’s not just one large dose of money that is needed. That is just the beginning. Building a drinking water and sanitation system is a capital project. But once the system is built and operating, what then? How do you keep it going? What about the electricity to run the pumps? What about the chlorine or other treatment chemicals to make the water safe? What about technicians to fix it when things go wrong?
Living water can be found not just in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It can also be found in the former republics of the USSR in Central Asia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Union became concerned that the system of providing for infrastructure such as water, sewage, and even electricity had collapsed along with the political structure. They did not want the 15 former Soviet republics to cobble together some old socialist financial mechanisms to pay for their infrastructure. No, the EU and the United States wanted the new self-governing states to create systems in sync with the modern international capital markets. In the late 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency organized a team to go to the Republic of Kazakhstan to set up a system for building safe drinking water and basic sanitation facilities — and to build about a dozen of them.
After the collapse of communism, the collective-farm system collapsed too. With that demise went the government workers who ran the water systems in the villages where the farm workers lived. After ten years, most of these drinking water and sanitation systems had collapsed as well. So, as part of the West’s effort to drag the former Soviet republics into the 20th century, EPA asked their team to organize a sustainable financial and managerial structure so that they wouldn’t collapse again.
In Kazakhstan, the central government took care of the environmental infrastructure in the major cities of Almaty, Astana, and Atyrau. But the rural areas were left to fend for themselves. So, the United States and European Union entered into an agreement with the Kazakh government to set up a rural water finance program, with demonstration projects in 15 villages in the Almaty Oblast region. The money for the demonstration projects would come 60 percent from the U.S. government, 20 percent from the Kazakh government, and 20 percent from the Oblast government.
The technology was no problem in Kazakhstan. All you had to do was pay for it. So, the projects got built. But what then? What happens when a pipe breaks, or the system runs out of chlorine? In this case, the team specifically chose villages where the local council would agree in advance to set up a modest fee collection system from all residents to pay for the chemicals, the electric power, and the maintenance on their systems. And once the money was there, the know-how was no problem.
So, the program worked in Kazakhstan. And it’s still working.
The area where the team worked in Kazakhstan was about 1,500 miles north of India. The Kazakhs were nomads who were overrun by the expanding Russian empire in the mid-19th century. After the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks organized vast areas into huge collective farms. They built villages to house the workers on these farms. And they built rudimentary systems to supply the villages with safe drinking water.
The first project was in a village of about 2,000 called Algabas. This is a wonderful Bolshevik-inspired name. Algabas means forward in the Kazakh language. About a month after the christening of the first project in Algabas by the U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, the mayor invited the team to formally inspect the system. It consisted of a re-bored well, a pump house that served as a water treatment facility, a 50-cubic-meter concrete storage tank, and stand pipes every 50 meters down each of the streets in the village. After meeting the village elders, the team adjourned to the mayor’s house for lunch.
The mayor’s wife was the village medical officer. She was trained as a dentist. This training is not like a typical dentist in the West with four years of college and another four years of dental school. In the Soviet Union, dental training was a three-year course immediately after high school. And that was it. After lunch, the mayor’s wife took the team to her office to see the logbook where she kept a record of all the illnesses that she treated each day among the villagers. But they had to hurry. She had gotten word that a woman was coming in from the mountains to get medical help. The woman was having a difficult pregnancy. So she was going to see a dentist — the only medical officer available.
So, the team went to the office in the village hall. She showed them her logbook — a vintage World War II, canvas-covered notebook. She showed the team page after page where virtually all of the entries said “dysentery.” Then there was the page with the date that the water system began operation. No more living water, no more dysentery. Before then, there was almost a page a day taken up with dysentery entries alone. After the water system started up, one page lasted more than a week reporting the other illnesses of the village, because there were no more cases of dysentery.
The team returned to Algabas in the fall. It was mud season. There are no paved roads in the village. Mud everywhere. As the water team walked back to their truck, a grandmother came toward them. She stopped right in front of them, got down on her knees right there in the mud, and kissed their hands — all the while muttering “thank you, thank you” in Russian.
But, as noted above, safe drinking water is about more than money. What happens when the pump shuts off? Or some of the pipes break?
The answer to this important question was provided by an amazing organization in the United States called the National Rural Water Association. The NRWA was founded in 1976, two years after the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The SDWA authorizes EPA to set national health-based standards for drinking water to protect against both naturally occurring and man-made contaminants. The NRWA was formed because many of the original EPA standards were written for large metropolitan water utilities; many smaller utilities did not have the resources to meet them. So the NRWA was founded by eight states.
A rural water system is one that serves less than 10,000 users. Over the years, the 42 other states have joined the NRWA and have formed their own local versions, so that state organizations now work with some 66,520 rural water systems in the United States.
As noted above, bringing safe water to those without it is about more than money. And that is where the NRWA’s greatest contribution to the United States and, hopefully, the world someday, enters the picture. The NRWA calls its gift the Circuit Rider Program. The NRWA began its program in 1980. The program was intended to provide support for small utility systems that did not always have the experience, equipment, training, or personnel to deal with large or persistent problems. Circuit riders usually operate within a specific area of their designated state, visiting the small utilities on a regular basis. The term comes from the old American West. In the 19th century, judges and law enforcement officers — sheriffs and marshals — were often responsible for large multi-county jurisdictions. They mapped out a circuit within their area and visited the towns there on a regular schedule on horseback. Hence they became known as circuit riders.
Today’s circuit riders are jacks-of-all-trades in the water business. Their job is to go around to rural water systems with little or no staffs and make sure their water is flowing and safe. They are electricians. They are plumbers. They are carpenters. They are water chemists. They are public health specialists. Circuit riders can fix any water system, no matter how it is broken.
In Central America, the U.S. concepts were put to the test. The International Rural Water Association became the daughter corporation of the NRWA. The NRWA exists on its modest dues income as well as grants from EPA and the Department of Agriculture. At first, the NRWA furnished the IRWA with a modest budget to do water infrastructure projects in Central America.
There was no problem with technology nor the expertise in Central America, since the NRWA/IRWA members brought it with them. Here in the United States, with small, rural water systems, the CEOs are often multi-talented and, in addition, represent their systems as the official NRWA members. And so it was that some were willing to donate their time to go to Central America to build rural water systems in poor villages. The result was the IRWA had both the money and the expertise to build systems in Central America.
The IRWA team also made sure that every village they worked in had some kind of a water committee that had the full support of the citizens — just as in Kazakhstan. But then they ran into a problem. No one in the villages had a clue what to do to maintain their systems or to fix them, if there were a problem. There were no circuit riders in Central America. Luckily, however, one of the IRWA team members was a circuit rider in the United States. He was able to work with the local water committees to show them at least the rudiments of day-to-day operation and maintenance of their systems.
The IRWA team realized that absence of circuit riders would be a major problem throughout rural Central America wherever the people were lucky enough to have a village water system. So, the organization began to focus on what could be done to train a cadre of circuit riders. They pondered how to create a training center for village water technicians in Central America.
As an initial problem, however the name circuit rider doesn’t translate easily into Spanish — or really into any other language. So, they couldn’t be called that. Furthermore, it was never going to be a high-paying job. The only reason for doing this work would be the pride of providing people with an essential service. The team, therefore, decided to give these technicians the honorific title of Caballeros de Agua, or Knights of Water.
Alas, it never came to pass. Although there were many circuit riders from the United States who would gladly have helped train the Central American technicians, this effort was slammed by an insurmountable problem: the IRWA program was coming to an end because of money problems at the parent NRWA.
So, where does the money come from today? The answer is twofold: from some governments and from private individuals through charitable organizations. We’ll take up the governmental sources first.
At the international level, the World Health Organization is not a source of funding, but rather a critical monitor. It has recently published its “Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking Water” report, somehow reduced to the acronym GLAAS. The WHO has usefully been tracking national water and sanitary health — with the better acronym WASH — efforts since 2008, providing a blueprint for potential funders.
The international development banks in Africa, Asia, and the Americas could be sources of funding too, but they aren’t. They’re banks. They make loans. They don’t make grants. One of the problems that the water poor have is that their governments don’t borrow money for safe water.
The U.S. government’s effort to bring water to the poor is housed in the Agency for International Development, which focuses on “high-priority countries where needs and opportunities are greatest.” The agency statistics show it provided $835 million to support WASH activities in 51 countries during the first two years of implementation of the federal government’s Global Water Strategy, fiscal years 2018 and 2019.
In addition to governmental efforts, private organizations are also very active in the campaign to bring safe water and decent sanitation to the poor. One of the most important, and also perhaps one of the most improbable, is the Rotary Club. Rotary International is probably the biggest and most generous of all the private organizations bringing water to the developing world. There are over 35,000 Rotary Clubs in some 200 countries across the planet.
In 2007, some club members formed the Water And Sanitation Rotary Action Group, using the acronym WASRAG. (Some years later, presumably because most of the rest of the world refers to the problem as the “water and sanitary health” issue with the acronym WASH, Rotary decided to change its group’s name too.)
In the last 14 years, Rotary has built several hundred million dollars of developing world water and sanitation systems and is now participating in an estimated $100 million of projects each year. You can look at what they have done by looking them up at wash-rag.org.
WaterAid is another major force in the water poor war. It is an international organization set up in Britain in 1981 at the beginning of the UN’s International Drinking Water Decade. In 2010, WaterAid became a federation and now has affiliates in 27 countries, including the United States. Its 2019 budget was almost $160 million.
In another improbable story, the creation of the H20 Africa Foundation by American actor Matt Damon was announced at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006 at the showing of Running the Sahara, which Damon co-produced. In 2009, this group merged with another water charity called WaterPartners. The new organization is just called Water.org. Since its founding Water.org and its predecessors have “empowered more than 36 million people with access to safe water or sanitation.” Working with 154 partners across the globe, the organization has mobilized over $2.9 billion for the water poor.
There are also a number of other organizations that do this work. Water for People was formed in Colorado in 1991 by the American Water Works Association. In addition to Africa, this organization works both in Central America and South America. Water for People has undertaken projects in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Malawi, Nicaragua, Peru, Rwanda, and Uganda. They have completed projects in almost 5,300 communities, which have impacted the lives of almost 3.7 million of the water poor.
In Texas there is a faith-based group appropriately named Living Water International. It was established in 1990 and currently operates in 21 countries. It has completed more than 21,000 water projects, which included drilling new water wells, harvesting water, and re-habilitating non-working wells. For the last several years, LWI has completed over $16 million worth of projects each year.
As you can see from the water work of both the government agencies and private organizations, the key to bringing safe drinking water and basic sanitation to the water poor is to do many small projects at the village level. It is also critical to make sure that the villages are onboard to collect the modest monthly sums necessary to operate their systems — and that technicians are available to keep the systems operating properly. There is an axiom in environmental finance: the less expensive the projects, the more projects will get done. The more projects that get done, the better will be the quality of life for the people on this fragile planet. And, if more water projects are built, there will be fewer water poor. TEF
