[MDGs] UN faces challenges to bring safe water to world.

The numbers speak volumes, a Niagara of challenges in the United Nations battle for safe water: 4,000 children dying each day from water-borne diseases; 400 million youngsters lacking even the bare minimum of safe water they need to live; a staggering 2.6 billion people without access to basic sanitation.

As the UN system celebrated World Water Day today, launching the international Water for Life Decade, it is the figures and individual case histories, beyond the messages of agency heads, that bring home the enormity of the task facing Planet Earth as it seeks to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spotlighted water deprivations that account for at least 1.6 million out of 11 million preventable child deaths every year. Nearly three children die every minute from water-related causes like diarrhoea and typhoid. In sub-Saharan Africa, where one in five children will never see their fifth birthday, 43 per cent of children drink unsafe water, risking disease and death with every sip.

With 1.1 billion people still drinking from unsafe sources like unprotected wells, rivers, ponds and street vendors, many millions of children are pushed to the brink of survival by repeated bouts of illness.

At least 20 litres of safe water per day, about two buckets, are essential to enable children to drink, wash hands of disease-bearing dirt and cook a simple meal. Without it, they become easy prey for a host of life-threatening afflictions carried in dirty water and on unwashed fingers.

Yet, according to UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2005, 21 per cent of youngsters in developing countries are severely water deprived, living without a safe water source within a 15 minute walk of their homes.

The disparities between the developing and developed worlds are staggering. An average Canadian uses over six times as much water per day as an average Indian, and over 30 times as much as a rural villager in Kenya. Within countries, too, there are equally dramatic disparities, often between urban and rural areas. In urban Indonesia, access to safe water averages at 89 per cent, while in rural areas it was only 69 per cent or lower.

“Our failure to provide a mere two buckets of safe water a day to every child is an affront to human conscience,” UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. “Far too many are dying as a result of our inertia, and their deaths are being met with a resounding silence.”

For its part, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported from Gegriyaad, the Plain of Death, in Somalia, so named because of the number of drivers who perish of thirst there every year when their trucks or cars break down on the way to Djibouti.

At this frontline trench in the war against thirst in the Zeila district on the Gulf of Aden, where the mercury climbs to over 50 degrees Celsius between June and September, one old-timer comments: “When a bird flies from one tree to another, he will die before reaching the next tree.”

As if nature was not harsh enough, man destroyed Zeila’s only sources of water – five boreholes – during the long-running civil war and there was no way Somali refugees could return to the region. But now UNHCR has re-drilled and re-equipped four boreholes in cooperation with UN and non-governmental organization (NGO) partners.

Even with the four boreholes, however, nomadic herders spend three or four days travelling in each direction to fetch water for their families and their animals, transporting the priceless commodity to their homes on the backs of donkeys and camels.

This is just a microcosm of the enormity of the challenge facing an agency that currently seeks to help some 17 million people in more than 116 countries. In Tindouf, Algeria, a project is underway to improve water supply to Smara camp in the middle of the Sahara desert, home to tens of thousands of refugees from Western Sahara.

In another desert refugee camp setting in eastern Chad, where more than 200,000 refugees from Sudan’s Darfur conflict have sought safety, UNHCR continues to struggle to provide sufficient water to meet the refugees’ daily needs, trucking in water, drilling boreholes, digging wells and resorting to high-tech satellite images and remote sensing technology to try to identify additional sources of water.

March 22, 2005 - UN News Centre

[Global Poverty] Annan calls for deal by world leaders

In a new report released today, Secretary-General Kofi Annan put forward a comprehensive deal for tackling poverty, security threats and human rights abuses while overhauling the United Nations through a set of recommendations slated for action by national leaders when they gather to mark the world body's sixtieth anniversary later this year.

Taking its name from a phrase in the UN Charter the report, In Larger Freedom marks the culmination of a process Mr. Annan has initiated to realign the world body in this milestone year so that it can better respond to today's pressing challenges.

If acted on, the proposals – ranging from a nine-member increase in the Security Council's membership to the establishment of a new Human Rights Council – would mark the most dramatic change in the UN's functioning ever achieved at once.

The report, the full text of which can be accessed at www.un.org/largerfreedom, argues that this seismic shift is warranted by the interrelated imperatives at stake. “[W]e will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights,” Mr. Annan warns. “We can and must act together.”

The report's first main section, “Freedom from want,” deals with the deadly toll of poverty, which currently plagues more than a billion people in a world beset by growing inequality. “A single bite from a malaria-bearing mosquito is enough to end a child's life for want of a bed net or $1 treatment,” the Secretary-General points out. He adds that while this sad reality has long been viewed as an inescapable aspect of the human condition, that view is now “intellectually and morally indefensible.”

In order to achieve the far-reaching Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – a set of anti-poverty targets agreed to by world leaders at a 2000 UN summit – he proposes that all developed States allocate 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to official development assistance by no later than 2015, with significant increases by 2006.

Calling climate change “one of the greatest environmental and developmental challenges of the twenty-first century,” Mr. Annan notes that the Kyoto Protocol, a pact that contains binding targets for the emissions that cause climate change, only extends until 2012. He calls for developing a more inclusive framework beyond that date with broader participation by all major emitters and both developed and developing countries.

In the second main section, “Freedom from fear,” the Secretary-General endorses a report he commissioned by a high-level panel on threats, challenges and change. “I fully embrace the broad vision that the report articulates and its case for a more comprehensive concept of collective security: one that tackles new threats and old and that addresses the security concerns of all States.”

Specifically, he backs the panel's definition of terrorism – an issue so divisive agreement on it has long eluded the international community – stating unequivocally that “any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.”

This proposal has “clear moral force,” he says, urging world leaders to back it and conclude a comprehensive terrorism treaty during the next General Assembly session.

The report's other security proposals include a call for a fissile material cut-off treaty aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation, and the creation of a UN Peacebuilding Council to help countries emerging from conflict.

The report's third main section, “Freedom to live in dignity,” deals with human rights and democracy. The Secretary-General recommends replacing the current Commission on Human Rights with a standing Human Rights Council whose members are elected directly by the General Assembly and who “undertake to abide by the highest human rights standards.”

He also calls for the creation of a democracy fund to help countries in need and pledges to galvanize UN efforts in this field.

The last main section deals with strengthening the UN and sets out measures to improve its workings, including reforming the Security Council. Here again, Mr. Annan backs the high-level panel, which outlined two possible models for increasing the Council's membership in order to make it more representative and inclusive.

Model A provides for six new permanent seats, with no veto, and three new two-year term, non-permanent seats, divided among the major regional areas. Model B provides for no new permanent seats but creates a new category of eight four-year, renewable-term seats and one new two-year, non-permanent (and non-renewable) seat, divided among the major regional areas.

Although Security Council reform has been discussed at the UN for decades, the issue is so complex and politically sensitive that agreement has been impossible. Seeking to break the deadlock, Mr. Annan urges realistic action. “It would be preferable for Member States to take this vital decision by consensus,” he says, “but if they are unable to reach consensus this must not become an excuse for postponing action.”

The report also contains a number of proposals for improving the UN Secretariat. “Today's United Nations staff must be: (a) aligned with the new substantive challenges of the twenty-first century; (b) empowered to manage complex global operations; and (c) held accountable,” the Secretary-General declares.

In order to foster progress on this front, Mr. Annan requests that the General Assembly give him the authority and resources to offer a one-time buyout for UN personnel “so as to refresh and realign the staff to meet current needs.”

Urging countries to act on the deal offered in the report, he says it is both necessary and achievable. “What I have called for here is possible,” he says. “From pragmatic beginnings could emerge a visionary change of direction in our world.”

March 20, 2005 - UN News Centre