Water Services That Last
Life-Cycle Costs Approach
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Integrated Water Resources Management

World Water Council and GWP

With more than half of the 1990s gone, the World Water Council was established in Marseille, France, in 1996 as a non-profit global think tank raising awareness about the importance of water. The Global Water Partnership was established by the World Bank to facilitate action on Integrated Water Resources Management in countries. The mission of the World Water Council is to promote awareness and build political commitment, up to the highest decision-making level, to facilitate efficient conservation, protection, development, planning, management and use of water in all its dimensions on an environmentally sustainable basis for the benefit of all life on earth.

To fulfil its missions and objectives, the World Water Council has created the World Water Forum, accompanied by a major Ministerial Conference every three years. The first one in 1997 in Morocco endorsed the development of a Vision for Water, Life and the Environment. This was endorsed with a Putting the World Water Vision into action plan in March 2000 at the Second WWF in the Hague.

VISION 21: Water for People is part and parcel of the World Water Vision.
The Third World Water Forum is in Japan, in March 2003.

The problems

This short summary shows one of the problems with advocacy in the water and sanitation sectors: a succession of too many initiatives: too many international conferences dealing with water without sufficient national follow-up, too many good intentions from a relatively small group of internationals experts without real grounding in national and community settings.

Other problems include:

  • Too many messages, too many organisations dealing with water; insufficient involvement of civil society, and the lack of a concerted, well researched, monitored long-term advocacy and communication programming.
  • No clear understanding that advocacy (gaining political and societal commitment for a cause) is part of a wider communication development process that encompasses social mobilisation (of relevant allies and partners) and programme communication (media use etc).
  • Lack of an overall international agency to champion water, sanitation and hygiene, in the way that the International Red Cross does for emergencies, UNICEF for mother and child care, WHO for health, UNEP for environment, UNFPA for family planning and FAO for food and agriculture. Lack of national-level and local-level champions lead a push for change.
  • Advocacy for prioritising water, sanitation and hygiene has never reached the grassroots and has not involved wider civil society. Insufficient links have been made with social movement groups like women's groups, organisations of the urban poor, farmers' cooperatives and local NGOs working on environment, against poverty, etc. Advocacy has been mainly directed at the professional and global bureaucracy levels.

Funding for public information and awareness raising has decreased in many UN and bilateral agencies, as is illustrated by the relatively poor performance of the UN World Water Day celebrations organised by a different UN agency each year since 1993.