UNDP focuses on water and poverty reduction

The Third World Water Forum, held in Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka, Japan, on 16 -23 March, will highlight actions to solve key global water problems, including bringing safe drinking water to the more than one billion people who lack it and adequate sanitation for the 2.4 billion people without it. This will be the first opportunity to take stock of progress since the World Summit on Sustainable Development held last August in Johannesburg, following-up on its outcomes related to improved water supply, sanitation and water management.

More people die each year from water-related diseases than from both war and HIV/AIDS, including two million children under five. In the next two decades, water use will increase by 40 per cent, and by 2025, nearly two-thirds of the world's population will live in regions where water supplies are under stress.

The forum is considering key issues including water and poverty, effective water governance, integrated water resources management and capacity development -- all important aspects of UNDP work in this sector. In addition, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), endorsed by world leaders at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, depends on improving access to safe water and sanitation. Without a change in the way we use and govern water, the battle to eradicate poverty and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be severely hampered.

UNDP is leading a discussion at the forum on water and the MDGs, focusing on ways to achieve the target by 2015 of halving the number of people lacking safe drinking water and its link to other targets, including those for halving severe poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality, and promoting gender equality.

UNDP Administrator, Mark Malloch Brown will launch the Community Water Initiative, which will provide grants to encourage local activities in watershed management, water supply and sanitation, on 21 March 2003. UNDP Global Goodwill Ambassador Misako Konno of Japan will also participate.

Mr. Malloch Brown is also addressing legislators from around the world at a meeting on Water and Parliamentarians on the same day, organized by Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE) International and GLOBE Japan. UNDP is strongly positioned to support improved water governance at regional and national levels through its wide network of country offices and in close partnership with the public and private sector and civil society.

Another UNDP-sponsored event is the launch of a Resource Guide on Gender Mainstreaming in Water Management, a publication supporting women's role in this key sector.

UNDP is joining with other partners in more than a dozen other events at the forum, including panels on water and climate change; effective water governance; water and cities; and water, education and capacity building.