HRH Prince of Orange stresses partnerships, knowledge exchange, advocacy and capacity building

In his opening statement the Prince stressed the importance of building partnerships to address the following four key challenges in this process:

1. to increase knowledge exchange; the circle must be broadened to include not just water specialists, but also people involved in developing policies and frameworks in areas such as forestry, energy, finance, health, population and education.
2. to enhance public and political commitment and improve policy and legislation to increase the effectiveness of water and sanitation governance.
3. to build capacity to bring the knowledge to those who need it for implementation.
4. and one of the biggest challenges: to seek new sources of investment in the water sector.

On the institutional and human challenge

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals is not only a matter of finding money to finance new infrastructure. There is an equally important institutional and human challenge. In fact, provisional figures indicate that managerial and professional capacities in the developing world have to double in Asia and triple in Africa and need to be raised by half in Latin America to achieve the water and sanitation goal. This calls for a quantum leap in capacity building, in the form of greatly increased support to education and training institutes. The efforts of, for instance, the UNESCO-IHE Institute of Water Education and its partners and the Capacity Building Network for Integrated Water Resources Management (CAPNET) need to be stepped up.

On progress:

The reports of the Secretary-General on freshwater management and sanitation clearly indicate what tasks lay ahead of us. More than 80% of people with no access to safe drinking water live in rural areas and two billion people will need to gain access to sanitation facilities between now and 2015 if the international sanitation target is to be reached. Enormous challenges await us here.

Many countries in Asia are on track to meet the target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015. In other regions however, entire populations are struggling. To meet the target, 1.6 billion people should be provided with access to drinking water by 2015 and investments in the drinking water sector should be doubled. Contaminated water sources, inadequate operation and maintenance of pumps and distribution systems, leakage of water from pipes are just a few of the problems that need to be overcome first.

These investments in hardware need to be supported by public-private partnerships, since they will attract more investment. And they need to be accompanied by programmes to raise awareness of and improve hygiene and sanitation, particularly in schools. Women need to be involved in the entire planning and decision-making process, since they are usually directly responsible for securing domestic water supplies and for family hygiene.

On the urgency:

Our settlements, our health, the food on our tables, our sanitation, our basic human rights, our industrial processes, our energy and our environment all depend on the quality and quantity of water, and our management of water as the single most precious, life-sustaining resource.

Nothing less is at stake in this session than how we choose to shape tomorrow from a today that is already precarious. In twenty short years a future is predicted in which one third of the world’s population will live under moderate to severe water stress. Many cities are already short of water. Where will we find enough for drinking and how will we provide adequate sanitation? How can we secure the access to clean water, sanitation and affordable health, whether people live in cities, towns or villages?

How will we grow the food to feed two billion more people, when it takes one ton of water to grow a pound of cereal or 3,000 litres of water for a kilogram of rice? Rising prosperity as well as growing population will drive world cereal demand up by 50% between 1997 and 2020. We already use more than 75% of the water we extract for agriculture. Can we truly imagine expanding this figure, to the peril of our environment and ourselves?

Full speech