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March 2006—World Water Forum in Mexico City. To Promote the Access to Water and the Decontamination in Sahelien Africa

In the present debates on the issues of water, Eau Vive positions itself on four major points:

• the promotion of the right to water for all,
• the battle against the privatisation of the resource of water, mutually shared by humanity,
• the recognition of the cost of water service,
• the installation of management systems guaranteeing the access to water for all, in particular the most vulnerable populations

Other actors defend the same ideas. Eau Vive joins them if there is a common view on these four points and if the priority given to the most desolate populations and particularly in Africa. In regard to two distinct questions: the access to water, the service of water

1. The access to water: a priority

With the rural communities of the Sahel, Eau Vive contributes to improve the access to water and decontamination for 100 new people per day. This daily work lies along with the reciprocal commitments taken by the rural communities:

•  All projects of access to water and decontamination must be founded on the initiative and the responsibility of the population itself, with all its components, in particular women.

•  The right of access to water and decontamination is indivisible from other human rights; in particular those of living in peace and security. The democracy and the respect of fundamental human rights must be guaranteed by each state with the support of the international community.

•  The access to water and decontamination must subscribe itself in the affirmed national politics, understanding: the protection of the resource of water, the fight against pollution, the management of water by river basin, the workings of a law on water, the control of the market and the price of water, the local financial contribution following the level of revenues, the taking sustainable charge of the functioning sites, the planning of the supplies to the success, the priority to the most vulnerable populations.

•  Water is not a traded good, it is a collective heritage that one has to protect, defend, and treat as such. Of public power and private interest, nothing can be suitable for this resource.

•  For the return, the service of water has a cost: water is not therefore given freely. The price of water and decontamination must correspond to the service of comparable access, provided by a public service or delegated to a private company, under the control of the users and the representatives of the state. A system of local, national, and international equilibrium can improve the access to water and decontamination, in particular for the poorest people.

•  The projects for access to clean water must be completed by decontaminated equipment and hygienic means and linked to the health of the water.

•  If the water is itself the first wealth, it is also, with a complement of means, a source of new wealth: It permits the improvement of health, more production and reinforcement of food security, and the regeneration of the environment. Water is also an area of job creation that calls on skill and local businesses. The entire community organizes and reinforces itself around water.

•  To be viable in the long term, the access to water and decontamination projects must be accompanied for the duration by: establishment and supplies in the areas of health, training, and craft and agricultural production. This is also the daily work of Eau Vive, with more than 600 rural communities in five countries of the Sahel, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Niger.

2 . The Service of Water : a simple choice of means.

Actually, a large polemic opposes advocates and adversaries of the privatisation of the service of water. For Eau Vive, which depends on more than thirty years of field experience:

•  A good service of water is only possible on the basis of a sharing of the responsibilities and the attributes between four types of major actors

1. A national public actor: the state, legislature, planner, and regulator at the national level like in the set up of management systems at the international lever (river basins notably, for example at the heart of the Authority of the Basin of the Niger )
2. A local public actor: the concerned human collective (town, county, region…), manager of the investment and management of the service of water and decontamination at the local level. This collective chooses to administer the service itself or to delegate it to a private actor in the frame of clear procedures, transparent for the users of the service.
3. The users from this community: organised, formed, they are therefore actors in the realisation of the equipment and then of their management, becoming responsible in the support and control of the management of the service.
4. Eventually the private actors, stepping in strictly at the request of the local collective manager, to assure all or part of the service in the strict frame of a precise and transparent delegation (hydrant worker, repair men, businesses…).

•  Public or private management of water service? The question in fact is not pertinent:

1. Examples of good and bad management abound in either case;
2. It is not the actors as much who are contestable, it is the attribution of the market, the technical and financial management of the service, its pricing, and above all the act that one doesn't consider for the right to water for all;
3. The focus on the role of the big international groups, of which certain practices are sometimes very contestable, because other actors are most often prevented from playing their role, masking a more important issue: the establishment of the work managers and the users, an incontrovertible step to allow the satisfying access to water and decontamination. Consequently, it is necessary to fund this, not only for the success of the sites, but also for the establishment of a local governance of the water and the decontamination.

•  The action of an NGO like Eau Vive consists of proposing concrete solutions, given from field experience. It knows in which conditions this water service can be assured:

1. It must be primarily to the profit of the rural surroundings; particularly in Africa: this sector is the most neglected in terms of investment and support to the formation of local actors;
2. It has to call on the competence and interests of all the actors, public or private, susceptible to contribute to it;
3. It has to respect the expectancy and the precise requests of the actors of the country, at the national level just like the local level.

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