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Water Quality and the Millennium Development Goals

Digging a toilet by communal labor in Fotobi (Eastern Region), Ghana

by Brett Walton, guest blogger

With five years until the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations has released a series of progress reports. The water and sanitation April 2010 update states that the world is on track to meet the drinking water goal, but will fall far short of the target for sanitation. The problem with the MDGs, however, is that they don’t measure what you think they measure.

The UN established the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 as a metric for improving the lives of the world’s poorest. The goals cover economic, physical and social well-being: maternal health, poverty, gender equality. The MDGs for water and sanitation seek to reduce by half the number of people without access to improved drinking water sources and improved sanitation. The UN provides a list of what qualifies as an ‘improved’ source – boreholes, in-house connections, protected wells, rainwater collection – but the dirty little secret of the drinking water target is that it has nothing to do with the water’s quality.

The water goal is a target that assess infrastructure, not water quality. A community can be using an improved source while still drinking tainted water. A pilot study by the World Health Organization found that the majority of piped systems deliver quality water, but only 40-70 percent of other improved sources meet WHO microbial standards.

This is why the theme of World Water Day this year was water quality. I was in Nairobi, Kenya covering the day’s events for Circle of Blue, a non-profit news agency reporting on water issues, and listened to many speakers discuss the consequences of dirty water. To wit, half of all hospital beds in the developing world are occupied by people with a water-related illness; roughly 90 percent of the waste water in developing countries is dumped untreated into water bodies; and more than 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation facilities.

Water and sanitation are not separate problems, but they are sometimes treated as such. “No policymaker will tell you sanitation comes before drinking water,” said Maurice Bernard from the French Development Agency. Yet, if the drinking water MDG is to have any meaning, it must go hand in hand with sanitation improvements.

Development money alone is not a solution. Zafar Adeel, the UN water chief, told me that past failures occurred because the approach was too technical.

“What historically we have done is to stay focused on water quality, on monitoring and research, but relating it to people’s lives and policies is something that we have not done very well before,” he said.

Bernard said that if he were given $10 billion to invest in clean water he would put it towards capacity building; that is, investment in management, governance and social capital.

National governments, he said, are where most solutions will take place.

It’s difficult to get a handle on a problem you can’t measure. Many people in Nairobi admitted that we don’t know how many people have clean water because it is quite expensive to carry out micro-level water quality testing on a broad scale. To that end, WHO and UNICEF are doing pilot tests in several countries.

Knowing the extent of the problem is a first step. Applying the right medicine is a much farther bound.

A Conversation with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed

An event hosted by Global Washington at the University  of Washington’s Magnusson Health Sciences Building with sponsorship from the UW Department of Global Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, May 25^th 2010.  Open to the public, free of charge.

By Evan Forward

On Tuesday afternoon, I was privileged to attend “A Conversation with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed” at the Magnuson Health Sciences Center.    With Muhammad Yunus’ visit still fresh in my mind from Sunday at Town Hall, I was ready for more inspiration on the same plane.  Abed did not disappoint.  It has me wondering a bit what they have got in the water in Bangladesh that they could produce such world changing figures as Yunus and Abed in the same cohort.

The question of drinking water was the problem that set Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in motion in 1978 to create Brac. Brac is now the largest global development organization in the world in terms of scale and impact having served over 110 million people throughout Asia and Africa to date.  BRAC began when Abed decided to solve the problem of infant mortality in Bangladesh which was at that time largely due to dehydration from water borne illnesses. By creating a program for mothers to learn skills to perform infant oral rehydration, Abed found the solution. A simple model and yet incredibly powerful in its leverage. A piece of knowledge communicated to a mother can save her child.   True.

But Abed’s most remarkable quality, in my mind, is his uncanny ability to scale concept to need. Within months of starting Brac, Abed was leading a staff of more than 5,000 people eradicating diarrhea across the country in larger and larger swaths.  Over the 38 years since, Abed has diversified BRAC into dozens of ventures that touch on education, public health, banking and micro-lending, manufacturing industries, agricultural fields and others.

Questions:

How do you maintain consistent quality in your programming while achieving such radical growth in the scale and scope of your offerings at BRAC (BRAC now employs a work force of over 50,000 people)?

“Quality control.” Abed said simply with a smile. It’s common sense, he seemed to say. Abed continued on to say that Brac has a substantial research and evaluation department that is continually monitoring impact.  Abed explains that impact is what Brac focuses upon when it comes to evaluating which brings to mind the Rick Davies and Jessica Dart’s Most Significant Change methodology.   I recommend checking it out. It’s a complete participatory M&E framework but its even more because the significant change concept can be adapted into many different types of qualitative research methodologies.  You can download the entire guide to it’s use by clicking this link. Or cut and paste: http://www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.pdf.

Further on the topic of quality, Abed later shared more insights when he responded to a question about corruption:

“Brac has 182 internal auditors,” Abed replied. Abed explained that this corps of accountants is responsible for checking the books in all of the arenas that Brac ventures in. If any of the numbers are slightly off, they investigate the problem.  Corruption solved.

In addition to continuing to scale its operations in Asia and Africa to service ever more needs, Brac has also decided to move into Haiti. But Abed explains that Brac’s recent entrance into Haiti is not simply intended as relief effort for the crisis that ensued the earthquake.

“When Brac enters a country, it is there for a lifetime,” Abed says without hesitation in his voice, “Brac will be in Haiti for the next 50 to 100 years.”  Life is fleeting perhaps, but a model for action, growth and change such as what Abed’s work has introduced to the world is everlasting.  I believe him what he claims.

I encourage you to have a look at BRAC’s website, www.brac.net.

A New Way Forward on Global Development: How the Leaked White House Plan Measures up to Global Washington’s Principles of Aid Effectiveness

by Linda Martin, Global Washington Volunteer

As the U.S. government is poised to enact historic changes in foreign aid policy, Global Washington has convened members of Washington State’s global development sector to offer support and recommendations for these changes. Global Washington’s main recommendation is to base reforms on our four Principles of Aid Effectiveness: 1) Transparency and Accountability 2) Consolidation and Coordination of efforts 3) Local Ownership and 4) Targeting Aid to communities most in need.  These principles are presented in Global Washington’s white paper, Making U.S. Foreign Assistance More Effective, which lays out a framework for assessing aid effectiveness.

What do Global Washington’s recommendations and the leaked White House plan for development policy, known as the PSD, have in common?  How does the PSD measure up to Global Washington’s four Principles of Aid Effectiveness?

The recently leaked Presidential Study Directive (PSD) is built on three pillars: 1) A development policy focused on economic growth, innovation and more sustainable, systemic solutions 2) A new business model which better leverages partnerships throughout the foreign aid life cycle; requires greater selectivity in types of aid programs offered and stresses accountability, and 3) A modern architecture which brings together the development skills and experience currently dispersed across government to  support common goals.

The directive also proposes a national Global Development Strategy and intends to “elevate development as a central pillar of our national security strategy, equal to diplomacy and defense”.  Global Washington strongly supports both these proposals.

Transparency and Accountability

The PSD stresses the need for scientific analysis to help guide policy and programmatic decisions, and proposes to empower partner governments which “set in place systems that reflect high standards of transparency and accountability,” by working with their institutions, rather than circumventing them.

We support a national Global Development Policy which stresses transparency and accountability, and would like to see a greater emphasis placed on transparency, to help ensure that “information on strategy, goals and spending is easily available to U.S. taxpayers and international beneficiaries, thereby increasing accountability.”

Consolidation and Coordination

Global Washington recommends “giving USAID autonomy from the Departments of State and Defense so it may effectively oversee the national development strategy”. While the study directive falls short of this proposal, we are pleased with the administration’s decision to rebuild USAID as “our lead development agency” and to incorporate the work of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with USAID’s efforts.

Targeting

Overall, the administration is planning a shift from emergency based or basic needs aid, to sustainable solutions, particularly in the areas of health and agriculture.  Global Washington encourages our government to “target aid to countries and communities most in need” and to help the poorest countries meet the challenges of climate change, through increased aid.

We agree with the PSD’s proposal to focus on fewer recipient countries, to concentrate resources where the U.S. expertise can do the most good, and to employ rigorous monitoring to determine the most successful methods for reaching desired outcomes.

Local Ownership

The United States proposes to work directly with partner governments to address local priorities, and to mold U.S. development strategy to respond both to the unique circumstances of those in need. The directive emphasizes the use of in-country staff and local resources to implement programs.

We support these actions and encourage even earlier collaboration, in the planning and design of aid packages. Early involvement can help ensure program success and encourage local ownership. We also encourage the administration to help develop the capacity of local institutions and infrastructure, to ensure adequate delivery systems, and to develop in-country expertise necessary for sustainable, systemic solutions.

Global Education: A Missing Link to Development?

As the administration moves forward with a National Global Development Policy, we strongly recommend global education as a critical policy component with long term funding. Cultural competence is increasingly necessary for the U.S. to be competitive in a global economy. Education has a proven positive impact on health, reduces gender based violence, and boosts economies. We recommend the funding of programs in poor countries, which develop institutional capacity and the infrastructure necessary for children to safely attend school; and U.S. policies which facilitate student research collaborations, ensure flexible visa access for students, improve cross-sector program coordination,  foster language acquisition, and expand student exchange. We encourage the funding of innovative programs from the elementary to university level, which prepare children, youth and adults to embrace global citizenship for a better world.

A New Era

Comprehensive reform of U.S. foreign assistance will not be easy, but we have a great opportunity before us – to redefine our role in alleviating poverty, and to re-establish the U.S. as a leader in delivering a new kind of aid for a new era. We have the opportunity to raise the bar, by developing a framework based on transparency, accountability, collaboration, and local ownership. Through education, we can bring the best expertise worldwide to bear on the challenges the world’s poorest face. Through capacity building, we can help ensure the long term success of the institutions and infrastructures that deliver aid.