Poverty and Water: Explorations of the Reciprocal Relationship

by David Hemson, Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Kassim Kulindwa, Thomas Pogge, Haakon Lein

Overview

Rarely has such a contentious and complex issue emerged in twenty-first century development as that of water. In this book, co-editors David Hemson, Kassin Kulindwa, Haakon Lein, and Adolfo Mascarenhas use a global spread of case studies to illustrate that water is not simply an issue of physical scarcity, but rather a complex and politically-driven issue with profound future implications, both in the developing world and outside it.

The book argues that for the international community to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, governments must step in to protect the rights of the poor. Here, the links between poverty and access to clean water are explored with an eye to political reform that can end the exploitative policies of big business and help to shape a more equitable world for all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781842779620
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/01/2008
Series:	International Studies in Poverty Research
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.19(w) x 10.24(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

David Hemson is a researcher who works within an emancipatory and developmental paradigm with a keen interest in the transformation of social and industrial relations. He has developed expertise and managed research teams in the field of rural development, gender studies, social policy, social movements and the evaluation of water and sanitation delivery. Within the HSRC he carries responsibility for appraising service delivery particularly in rural areas in the context of the shift in responsibility to local government. He is committed to the critical exploration of the unprecedented development of market relations on a world scale, the process of uneven development, and the prospects for new forms of intervention for social equality.

Kassim Kulindwa is a senior research fellow and lecturer in economics at the Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar es Salaam. His main research interest is in the field of natural resources and environmental economics in relation to the sustainable development question. He has authored and co-authored books, chapters, and articles on structural adjustment and sustainable development, poverty, energy, biodiversity, environment, water resources and fisheries resources in Tanzania among others.

Haakon Lein is associate professor at the Department of Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His main interests lies within the field of natural resource management, rural development and climate change and disasters. He has for the last 20 years been in involved in research on the role of water in rural development in Bangladesh as well water management reforms in Tanzania and China (Xingjiang)

Adolfo Mascarenhas, was the first Tanzania Director of the Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning (BRALUP) and the founder Director of the Institute of Resource Assessment at the University of Dar es Salaam. Since 1966 BRALUP pioneered several research projects on water. In 1978-79 he was appointed as the first non-engineer consultant by UNICEF/ WHO to draft the policy paper on Water and Sanitation as Part of Primary Health Care. On his returban he was entrusted through BRALUP by two donors, with the task of implementing the UNICEF/WHO policy in 5 Regions in Tanzania. His major interest and publications have been on natural resources, famines/disasters and regional planning. He is now retired from the University and works independently on Environmental and Knowledge for development issues in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa.
David Hemson is a researcher who works within an emancipatory and developmental paradigm with a keen interest in the transformation of social and industrial relations. He has developed expertise and managed research teams in the field of rural development, gender studies, social policy, social movements and the evaluation of water and sanitation delivery. Within the HSRC he carries responsibility for appraising service delivery particularly in rural areas in the context of the shift in responsibility to local government. He is committed to the critical exploration of the unprecedented development of market relations on a world scale, the process of uneven development, and the prospects for new forms of intervention for social equality.

Kassim Kulindwa is a senior research fellow and lecturer in economics at the Economic Research Bureau, University of Dar es Salaam. His main research interest is in the field of natural resources and environmental economics in relation to the sustainable development question. He has authored and co-authored books, chapters, and articles on structural adjustment and sustainable development, poverty, energy, biodiversity, environment, water resources and fisheries resources in Tanzania among others.

Haakon Lein is associate professor at the Department of Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His main interests lies within the field of natural resource management, rural development and climate change and disasters. He has for the last 20 years been in involved in research on the role of water in rural development in Bangladesh as well water management reforms in Tanzania and China (Xingjiang)

Adolfo Mascarenhas, was the first Tanzania Director of the Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning (BRALUP) and the founder Director of the Institute of Resource Assessment at the University of Dar es Salaam. Since 1966 BRALUP pioneered several research projects on water. In 1978-79 he was appointed as the first non-engineer consultant by UNICEF/ WHO to draft the policy paper on Water and Sanitation as Part of Primary Health Care. On his returban he was entrusted through BRALUP by two donors, with the task of implementing the UNICEF/WHO policy in 5 Regions in Tanzania. His major interest and publications have been on natural resources, famines/disasters and regional planning. He is now retired from the University and works independently on Environmental and Knowledge for development issues in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa.

Read an Excerpt

Poverty and Water

Explorations of the Reciprocal Relationship

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By David Hemson, Kassim Kulindwa, Haakon Lein, Adolfo Mascarenhas

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 CROP
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-266-5

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CHAPTER 1

Water and poverty: the inextricable link

Kassim Kulindwa and Haakon Lein

Introduction

'Poverty is still the gravest insult to human dignity and is still with us despite decades of international efforts to eradicate it. Life at the edge of existence.' This is how the former Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, and former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, characterised poverty. Today, more than 20 years after the Commission presented their report Our Common Future, the claim is still as valid as then.

Poverty can be defined in absolute and relative terms. Absolute poverty refers to individuals' abilities to meet their basic needs. In other words, individuals do not have the resources to meet their basic needs for healthy living and a dignified existence. They do not have the resources to provide for food, shelter, clothing and medical services, among other things. Relative poverty, on the other hand, compares the status of individuals against others in a community or society in terms of an income and wealth standard. According to this definition, the poor are those who have significantly less resources, mainly income and wealth, than others in their society.

Sen (1999) categorises poverty into 'income deprivation' and 'capability deprivation', terms that could loosely be equated to the above characterisation. It has to be noted, however, that income and capability deprivation, though different, are not necessarily independent of each other, for it is well known that although not all capabilities are determined by income, income nevertheless plays a significant part in generating capabilities. The broad definition is also acknowledged and used by many, including the EU, the World Bank and the UNDP. The UNDP considers poverty as a denial of human rights, good health, adequate nutrition, literacy and employment. It further asserts that, 'these are not favours or acts of charity to be bestowed on the poor by the governments and international agencies, instead, they are human rights as valid today as they were when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted'. As a consequence of the denial of their rights, many of the world's poor suffer oppressive political measures which hinder their development, and therefore poverty also has a political dimension.

The measurement of poverty is not without difficulties, given its complexity of definition. In practice, various institutions dealing with world development issues and poverty have given different figures for levels of poverty. Of late, criticisms have been hurled towards both the World Bank and the UNDP alleging that the adoption of a poverty definition of 'a dollar a day' produces a distorted picture of global poverty. It is argued that this definition departs from the established concepts and procedures for measuring poverty. Although the purchasing power parity concept is applied, the arbitrary 'dollar a day' does not have a realistic basis in terms of representing poverty across localities and boundaries. The same argument goes for the representation and categorisation of countries as being poor or rich based on their GDP per capita regardless of considering distribution and other aspects of capabilities, and access and enjoyment of other goods and services, natural or otherwise, that contribute to the quality of life.

However, less controversial measures have been developed which include the various aspects of capability deprivation; these include the Human Poverty Index (HPI) and its variants. Despite the practical difficulties of the definition and measurement of poverty, it remains clear that a measure of poverty using an index may help us to gauge the trends and the rate at which change is taking place. However, to decide on policy, strategy and action, we need to decompose the components of the poverty index in order to get a clear understanding of the nature and state of the components of the 'index number' in order to determine appropriate and effective solutions and implementation. In addition to the quantitative indications, qualitative analysis of the nonquantifiable elements of capability deprivation should concomitantly be carried out.

Water and poverty

The link between water and poverty is complex, but at the same time simple to understand. Access to adequate amounts of clean water is essential for maintaining good health, and access to water for agriculture is essential for food production. For poor rural farmers, these links may be unfolding first as a daily struggle to secure enough clean water for their households as well as for watering their crops. Without access to clean water, their children may be sick and their crops may fail. However, as with most poor people, a farmer will most likely have less access to water than the more wealthy in society, and what he/she does have will be of lower quality than the water they receive. Despite this, the farmer most likely will have to pay more – in the form of labour or money – for the water received (UNDP, 2006: 48–54). Inadequate and unequal access to water is, thus, both a result and a cause of poverty.

The close link between water and poverty is made clear in the United Nations Millennium Declaration adopted by the UN General Assembly on 8 September 2000, where it is stated (under point 19; http://www.un.org/ millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm) that:

We resolve further: To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and, by the same date, to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water.

The close link between poverty reduction and access to water was weakened when the declaration became operationalised into the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Halving the world's poor population became Goal No. 1, while the issue of securing access to safe drinking water only became a target under Goal No. 7, on 'Ensuring environmental sustainability'. Despite this, the goal of halving the number of people without access to clean water is probably one of the most cited and well known of the MDGs. It may also be one of the most difficult to achieve.

Although the links between water and poverty may be easy to grasp, the issue of how to organise our societies and our water resources so that the poor gain access to the water needed for consumption and production is still complex and highly contested. The problem of securing water for all is unfortunately too often perceived and presented as a question of physical lack of water available for human use. This is not the case. For instance, Africa faces large problems in securing sufficient and clean water for all, but physically the continent has more water available per capita than Europe. Physical water shortage is definitely a real phenomenon in some dry regions and countries of the world; however, water scarcity is a much more common phenomenon. Water scarcity is a term linking availability of water with use, implying that regions with ample available water resources may face water scarcity. Water scarcity is the result of the interplay between resource availability, consumption patterns (Table 1.1) and the (mis-)management of the resources. Water scarcity is thus linked to water governance rather than to shortage in the absolute physical sense of the term. Water governance, and especially the link between sustainable water governance and poverty, is the core theme of this book.

Water and health

Water-related diseases are among the most significant causes of deaths in many developing countries. Diarrhoea is the second-largest cause of deaths among children under the age of five years in Asia and Africa (UNDP, 2006: 43). Five times as many children die of diarrhoea as of HIV/AIDS, despite the fact that reducing the risks linked to the disease is a fairly straightforward issue: clean water and sanitation 'are to diarrhoea what immunization is to killer diseases such as measles and polio: a mechanism for reducing risks and averting deaths' (UNDP, 2006: 43). Access to water and sanitation is also essential for reducing instances of other serious water-related diseases, such as intestinal helminths (parasitic worms) and schistosomiasis, which cause so much misery, especially on the African continent.

Securing people's access to improved water sources and sanitation is undoubtedly a big challenge. As Table 1.2 shows, Africa lags behind in water supply coverage in both urban and rural areas, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, and then Asia. Rural coverage is worst in rural Africa, where most of Africa's poor live.

The main challenge relating to water supply is not only how to expand coverage to larger segments of the population, but also how to make sure that the poor have better access to water. Securing access to clean water for the poor is obviously a complex issue. As discussed in more detail by Hemson in Chapter 2, various, rather ambitious, water initiatives and reforms have been launched during the last 40 years or so, but they have been at best only half-heartedly implemented. The International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade in the 1980s aimed at supplying safe drinking water and sanitation services to all by 1990. The period since then has been far less ambitious, as reflected in the more modest MDGs. However, to aim to halve the population without access to improved water sources may also prove to be unrealistic. Further, there has been a change in approach from a reliance on public-health-driven water and sanitation efforts to what are often termed 'demand-driven approaches', often including elements of private sector involvement. Underlying this new approach is the idea that water should be treated as an economic good, which in turn lays the foundation for the introduction of various types of water pricing systems.

South Africa is one of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa that might face problems of water scarcity in the coming years due to limited resources and a high demand. South Africa faces problems of securing adequate access to clean water for those groups that were disadvantaged under apartheid. Several chapters in this book deal with South African experiences and the water reforms introduced in the post-apartheid era.

In Chapter 3, Goldin writes about water reforms in post-apartheid South Africa. A number of changes in water policy and legislation, strongly biased towards the rural poor living in former homelands and informal settlements, have been made since 1994. A key element in the reforms has been to create new institutions to include the interests and voices of previously disadvantaged groups. Using concepts of social capital, trust and shame, Goldin analyses the situation in a specific water user association as well as in the water sector generally. A key message emerging from her text is that restructuring and opening up old elitist institutions, which to a large extent have been based on reciprocity and trust (social capital), may prove to be a long and cumbersome process.

In Chapter 8, Hemson explores the relationship between water services and women's work to indicate the extent to which household care givers are being freed from drudgery to provide care and engage in productive income-generating activities. The current situation is that women have to carry out the menial and time-consuming task of fetching and carrying both water and wood. The cholera epidemic centred in KwaZulu-Natal, other water-borne diseases, and the rising incidence of HIV/AIDS place severe stress on the capacity of women to sustain families and undermine anti-poverty initiatives. Intervention at the level of communal facilities has reduced the time burden on women, but has not necessarily increased the level of consumption to improve family health.

In Chapter 9, Schulz outlines key elements of the new South African policy, which uses an increasing block tariff (IBT) water pricing system, and discusses how this system can support the welfare of the poor. The IBT includes a free-of-charge basic water supply (25 litres per person per day) and increased block tariffs combined with rebates targeted at poor households. Applying three different approaches to welfare (utilitarian, weighted utilitarian and Rawlsian), Schulz concludes that two of the models show that price discrimination will improve the welfare of consumers. Further studies have shown that the water demand of rich households is more responsive to price changes than that of poor households, indicating that the price mechanisms will mainly work in the upper income segment of the market. For the poor, price jumps in basic water supply will work more like a tax rather than as an incentive for reducing already low consumptions of water.

Moving on to Tanzania, in Chapter 7 Kulindwa elaborates on the use of cost-benefit analysis in water supply projects, based on a study from Kilosa in the Morogoro region. A number of water improvement projects were scrutinised: the results show that if a purely financial appraisal of the improvement projects is carried out, none of the projects are economically viable. However, if time saved on fetching water and health improvement effects are incorporated, the picture changes dramatically and several of the projects become economically viable. The policy conclusion is that there may be a limited scope for private commercial involvement in the water sector and that the state still has an important role in providing basic water supply services.

In Chapter 4, Aderinwale and Ajayi discuss the link between water and poverty in Nigeria. Drawing on experiences from four urban areas, they conclude that despite efforts by the government to improve and reform the water sector through a new water and sanitation policy, the government targets for the sector are far from being met. The situation in the four study areas is not up to a reasonable standard and the cost of safe water is described as exorbitantly high. The existing policies thus have to be revised and reinforced, and better monitoring systems have to be put in place for the situation to improve.

Water for agriculture

In addition to being a prerequisite for basic health, the link between water and MDG No. 1 (on halving the number of the world's poor by 2015) is clear and direct, as water is essential for food production and food security. An estimated 70 per cent of available freshwater resources are used for irrigation, and irrigated agriculture is of crucial importance for food production, contributing up to 40 per cent of the world's food production (World Bank, 2003); yet it accounts for only 20 per cent of farmland. In order to keep pace with a growing population, much more land must be brought under irrigation in the coming decades. In some regions, such as the Middle East and large parts of Asia, the potential for future expansion is limited, whereas in most of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America there is considerable untapped potential for bringing more land under irrigation (FAO, 2003).

Irrigation can be described as a technique for human intervention in the hydrological cycle, allowing expansion of crop production in both time and space (i.e. into new land which has not been utilised previously due to lack of sufficient rainfall, as well as into seasons with insufficient rainfall). In addition to allowing expansion of crop production in time and space, irrigated agriculture has a number of specific agro-economic advantages compared with rain-fed agriculture. Irrigation may give higher gross yields per unit of land through higher yields per crop, by more crops per year, through growth of heavier-yielding crops or by increased (and more profitable) use of major inputs such as manure and labour. Irrigation may also reduce yield fluctuations and allow more continuous and adaptable production. In sum, irrigation increases the production capacity of the farm, thus reducing the minimum farm size necessary for supplying the household.

While irrigation is a means to release some of the environmental constraints on agricultural production that are set by nature, it also requires the introduction of new technical and social arrangements linked to the appropriation and distribution of water. In settlements on the heavily irrigated slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, there is a saying that 'no man can irrigate alone' (Tagseth, 2001: 55), reminding us that irrigation is an inherently social undertaking. The social complexities of such undertakings may vary. Some scholars, such as Wittfogel (1957), have argued that throughout history irrigation has laid the basis of certain ('despotic') forms of state formation. On a smaller scale, numerous local studies of traditional irrigation have shown that irrigation has been sustainable for decades because of established social mechanisms for participation by all as regards both cost and benefits (e.g. Kaswamila and Masuruli,2004; Mkavidanda and Kaswamila, 2001; Mwakalila and Noe, 2004; Sokoni and Shechambo, 2005).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Poverty and Water by David Hemson, Kassim Kulindwa, Haakon Lein, Adolfo Mascarenhas. Copyright © 2008 CROP. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

1: Water and Poverty; the inextricable link - Kassim Kulindwa & Haakon Lein
2: Water for All: From Firm Promises to 'New Realism'? - David Hemson
3: It takes two to Tango - Steps towards Change in the Water Sector? - Jaqui Goldin
4: The Link between Poverty and Water Supply: The Nigerian Example - Ayodele Aderinwale & Olumide A. Ajayi
5: Water, Agricultural Development and Rural Poverty in Bangladesh - Haakon Lein
6: Opportunities for Reforming the Irrigation Sector: The Case of the Fish-Sundays Scheme of the Eastern Cape - Beatrice I. Conradie
7: Rural Water Supply Projects Appraisal and Poverty Eradication in Tanzania - Kassim Kulindwa
8: Easing the Burden on Women? Water, Cholera and Poverty in South Africa - David Hemson
9: Water Pricing, Inequality and Economic Welfare: How can the New South African Water Policy Support Well-being of the Urban Poor? - Carl-Erik Schulz
10: Conclusion: Water for the Poor Pays - Adolfo Mascarenhas