MUS at 4th World Water Forum, Mexico

A well attended session on multiple use water services at the 4th World Water Forum (20 March 2006) brought together local practitioners who are piloting integrated approaches to supply water for domestic and productive uses, and representatives of key international and national institutions from the domestic and irrigation sectors. Five local actions from Bolivia (Gustavo Heredia, Agua Tuya), Colombia (Holger Peña, CVC), Thailand (Sawaeng Ruaysoongnern, Khon Kaen University), Nepal (Bob Yoder, IDE) and South Africa (Theo Maluleke, AWARD) illustrated how in different conditions the partners of the ‘multiple use water services’ or ‘MUS’ project are implementing integrated approaches to meet poor people’s needs for access to both domestic and productive water. The benefits include improved food security, incomes, health, and improved sustainability of water systems linked to better willingness and ability of users to pay. For an example, see item 7 in this newsletter and the case study from Challacaba near Cochabamba in Bolivia.

A panel discussion later involved Peter Lee (International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage), Ede Jorge Ijiasz (Water and Sanitation Programme), Mary Renwick (Winrock International), Barbara Schreiner (Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, South Africa), Leyla Rojas (Ministry of Environment, Colombia), Teferah Woudeneh (African Development Bank) and Roberto Lenton (Global Water Partnership) who were challenged to reflect on whether their own organisations have been supporting multiple use approaches, and if not, why not!

Roberto Lenton from the Global Water Partnership said that he “enjoyed this series of presentations enormously, one of the most exciting things this week, dealing not only with problems locally but also with challenges of scaling up”. He went on to highlight that the session offered practical ways to implement integrated water resources management (IWRM): “These multiple use systems approaches are exactly perfect examples of what we like to think GWP is all about…they integrate solutions to difficult problems of water and development.” And he challenged us to think afresh because “it is we, the water professionals, who have created the barriers between us, and it is we who must break them down.”

Ede Jorge Ijiasz, the Global Manager of the Water and Sanitation Programme, thinks we can learn from the energy sector where they have already considered the question “are we supplying electricity to eradicate or illuminate poverty?” and have made strides to encourage enterprises to help make productive use of the energy being supplied. He went on to say that “We cannot do rural water supply projects without considering productive uses…..we should realise this in the same way that we learnt that sanitation had to be integrated with water supply in the 1980s.” The fact that we don’t do this widely, he feels, is linked to the problem of having a single, narrow Millennium Development Goal for water.

Leyla Rojas, the Director of Water Supply & Sanitation in the Ministry of Environment, Colombia said that we “should make this a priority in our agenda, and develop guidelines on how to design for a multiple use approach”. And Teferah Woudeneh from the African Development Bank also expressed his interest in seeing more pilot projects on multiple-use water services approaches, to help guide the major investment planned in rural water development, in particular through the African Water Facility.

Barbara Schreiner (Deputy Director General, Policy and Regulations, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, South Africa) reflected that “this is really about looking at local economic development – but from a bottom up rather than a top down perspective”. Noting that an enabling legal and institutional framework exists in South Africa relating to small-scale productive uses of water, “the issue is really for the people implementing it to understand what the potential is and what the opportunities are”. Describing multiple use water services as “the most exciting and new stuff that is on the table” she believes we now need to do a great deal of work in terms of tools, guidelines, capacity building to realise the potential benefits. “We are taking IWRM in essence another step and looking at IWRMs potential for looking at poverty eradication”

A number of challenges and cautions were also raised by panellists and the audience:

- could these approaches undermine our efforts to improve sanitation and health?

- can we manage to reach the ultra-poor with such approaches?

- in peri-urban and urban areas where people are served with expensive treated water, how can we meet multiple needs from multiple sources?

- how to include ecological sanitation and to make appropriate links to sanitation generally, including reuse of grey water?

The findings of the session will now be taken forward in subsequent events such as the Stockholm Water Week aiming to develop a broad partnership to realise multiple use water services.

Read more about the session at www.prodwat.watsan.net/page/594The session was convened by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, International Development Enterprise (IDE) and the TEC Global Water Partnership with financial support of the Challenge Program on Water and Food.

By John Butterworth