The World's Water: CARE Helps Make
the Most of Scarce Natural Resources

By Gretchen Hemes

(October 2000) -- Scarcity of one natural resource could directly affect everyone on Earth. That resource is water, something few living things can survive without. While the world's population is exploding, its water supply is not.

A CARE class teaches Bangladeshi women more about the importance of sanitation and clean water.

As CARE's senior advisor on water and sanitation, Peter Lochery has traveled the globe addressing water issues. Lochery works with CARE staff and poor communities to find practical, long-term solutions to water management.

In testimony this month before the U.S. House Commerce Committee, Lochery says the situation is fast approaching crisis proportions in developing nations with high population growth and low or variable rainfall. These areas include nearly all of the Middle East and large parts of northern and southern Africa.

To underscore the scope of the worldwide dilemma, he points to these statistics:

• More than 1 billion people do not have adequate access to safe drinking water.
• Almost half the world's population - nearly 3 billion people - lack sufficient sanitation systems.
• Water shortages, polluted water and poor sanitation kill more than 12 million people each year.

- Population Information Program, Johns Hopkins University

Lochery

These numbers illustrate why CARE works to maximize the benefits of access to water and sanitation, Lochery says.

CARE helps communities examine all their water needs - for drinking, sanitation, hygiene, agriculture and industry - then helps find ways to meet them. CARE believes the community should be setting the priorities from the beginning.

"One has to be humble when advising people with meager resources about water management, because they are already managing the water supply somehow," Lochery says. "They must be, they're surviving."

Water is a renewable, but finite resource. The amount of available fresh water on the planet has not changed significantly in thousands of years, Lochery says. What has changed significantly is the number of people who depend on that water. The continuing population explosion is the principle threat to sustainable water management.

The number of people managing extremely limited water resources is getting larger. As of 1998, 31 countries, accounting for more than 7 percent of the world's population, faced chronic water shortages. By 2025, 48 countries are expected to face such shortages, impacting 35 percent of the world's population, according to Population Information Program data.

Wells built with CARE's assistance help communities in Mozambique.

The question has been raised, could water crises lead to violent conflict?

"The consensus is, two friendly nations will not go to war over water," Lochery says. "Where nations have good relations, they will find a way to work out water issues. But where there is already discord between nations, then water scarcity will exacerbate the problem."

CARE's "big picture" approach to water management at the local level can help prevent and defuse such tensions by making the most of a scarce resource.

The AGUA Project in El Salvador is an example of what Lochery calls the "most important lesson learned during the last 25 years, the importance of putting people at the center and recognizing their right to affordable access to safe water and sanitation, and to make decisions about water management."

That means the community identifies the need, participates in the construction, protects the water system and watershed through pollution control and conservation, and pays for the service.

CARE staff members monitor progress on a water reservoir in El Salvador.

This last element, payment for use of water, is a key factor in the debate over water and sanitation services, says Lochery. In the past, governments or outside organizations provided nearly all of the installation costs and much of the operating costs. But over time, it was discovered that when water comes free, it is not respected or conserved, and there are insufficient funds for maintenance or improvements.

"Free service means no service," Lochery says.

Improved access to water has a variety of implications for a community, one of the most important being time. It is not unusual to have one family member spend six to eight hours each day collecting water, Lochery says. In a village of 30 families, that is about 77,000 hours dedicated annually to collecting water - time could be spent at school, caring for children, at a job or any other activity.

Additionally, CARE has found that better water management means better overall natural resources management.

"Water resource management requires soil conservation, forestry management and control of pollution from human and animal waste, agricultural runoff, industrial effluent and solid waste," says Lochery.

Life's mainstay is poured from a well built in Mali with CARE's assistance.

CARE's approach to water and sanitation has been evolving for 43 years. In that time, CARE has reached an estimated 10 million people in more than 30 countries. There are currently 63 projects underway in 29 African, Asian and Latin American countries. CARE spent $29 million last year on water and sanitation programs.

"CARE's strength lies in working at the local level," Lochery says. "We are one of the growing number of organizations in the world developing models in communities that can be scaled up to the national and regional level. The real excitement is learning lessons in the field and seeing how the effects can be multiplied by sharing them with different people in different places."