by Jenny Dyer

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by Lawrence Harrington

World Water Act would save countless lives

Oct. 4, 2010

Tennessee Voices

Lost in the high deci­bel debate of a polar­ized mid-term elec­tion, Ten­nessee Sen. Bob Corker recently teamed with Assis­tant Major­ity Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to pass the World Water Act, a mea­sure to pro­vide clean water and san­i­ta­tion to 100 mil­lion peo­ple around the globe.

If the mea­sure is passed by the House and signed by the pres­i­dent, bil­lions of dol­lars and mil­lions of lives — most of them chil­dren — can be saved thanks to lead­er­ship and long-term think­ing from both sides of the Sen­ate chamber.

For those of us who have come to expect clean drink­ing water at the turn of a han­dle, the prob­lem can be hard to grasp.

The com­plex­ity of water and san­i­ta­tion chal­lenges around the globe became appar­ent to me when I was run­ning the Mex­ico office of the Inter-American Devel­op­ment Bank and attended the Fourth World Water Forum in Mex­ico City.

World­wide drink­ing water is scarce

Over a bil­lion peo­ple world­wide live with­out safe water. More than 2.5 bil­lion lack ade­quate san­i­ta­tion, expos­ing them to intesti­nal dis­eases cost­ing lives and eco­nomic productivity.

The bur­den of haul­ing drink­ing water in many rural areas falls most heav­ily on women and girls, mak­ing it harder for them to stay in school.

Scarce health resources are spent treat­ing water­borne dis­eases.
Even before the full impact of cli­mate change, lack of decent water can cause mass emi­gra­tion and will be a major source of global inse­cu­rity in the com­ing decades.

Last week, U.S. researchers con­cluded that 80 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion lives in areas with “inse­cure” fresh water.

The Water for the World Act builds on exist­ing efforts to pro­vide sus­tain­able access to clean water and san­i­ta­tion in less devel­oped coun­tries. The mea­sure pro­vides addi­tional resources but ensures they will be spent effec­tively by encour­ag­ing donor coor­di­na­tion and rig­or­ous project eval­u­a­tion. It pro­motes global and regional coop­er­a­tion on research and technology.

For for­eign aid skep­tics, water and san­i­ta­tion is a good invest­ment. A dol­lar spent in this sec­tor can return as much as $8 by increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity and reduc­ing the health care and other expen­di­tures that result from lack of water and san­i­ta­tion. Our mil­i­tary can tell you that a good well may be more impor­tant to secur­ing a vil­lage than for­ti­fi­ca­tions. Inte­grated water man­age­ment reduces infra­struc­ture costs by bil­lions of dol­lars, invest­ments that many coun­tries can ill afford.

Even in rel­a­tively devel­oped coun­tries in Latin Amer­ica such as Mex­ico, small amounts of tech­ni­cal assis­tance improve man­age­ment and lever­age finance for strug­gling urban san­i­ta­tion systems.

Closer to home at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­sity, stu­dents are tak­ing steps to bring clean water and san­i­ta­tion to under­served com­mu­ni­ties.
Recently, mem­bers of Engi­neers With­out Bor­ders spent valu­able vaca­tion time using their skills to bring water to a poor vil­lage in Peru.

A Van­der­bilt engi­neer­ing stu­dent, Leslie Labruto, a mem­ber of the group, recently turned 21. She told friends to for­get a party and instead give money so a vil­lage in cen­tral Africa could get a new well.

Thanks to her self­less­ness, the vil­lage will have a source of clean water for years to come.

Sen. Corker points to per­sonal involve­ment like this — church mis­sions he made to Haiti years ago — as encour­ag­ing him to enter pub­lic ser­vice and offer­ing a deeper under­stand­ing of the devel­op­ment chal­lenges in poor countries.

Corker’s time as mayor of Chat­tanooga undoubt­edly helped him under­stand the impor­tance of pro­vid­ing basic ser­vices to a com­mu­nity and the imper­a­tive of coop­er­a­tion to do good work.

Ten­nesseans should hope this bipar­ti­san spirit moves the World Water Act through the House to the president’s desk.

Larry Har­ring­ton is an adjoint pro­fes­sor at the Cen­ter for Latin Amer­i­can Stud­ies at Van­der­bilt and a Nashville attorney.