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Why Water Should be a Top Priority! By Joachim Ibeziako Ezeji
Dwindling household incomes have necessitated the rise in various small scale entrepreneurial activities in urban centers around the world especially the third world.
Is it surprising why peri-urban centers or small towns have become ‘buffer’ zones to activities in urban centers? Besides other reasons, it offers a great role in land and water use for raw economic enterprises such as agriculture at a cheaper cost.
However, the role of water as a sustainable poverty alleviation tool seemed not to have been fully grabbed in Nigeria. In Nigeria, the provision of water in urban areas has often been intermittent. Water utilities have often suffered from lack of autonomy, High rate of unaccounted-for-water and poor revenue generation etc.
In most Nigerian cities, water vending is very rife, same with the use of various developed and undeveloped water sources. However the maximum use of rain water harvesting is still low.
Looking around the world, hundreds of millions of men, women and children live in extreme poverty. Their poverty is multi-faceted: besides lacking money, they have limited access to education, suffer from poor health, have little political weight, and are vulnerable to all manner of external shocks (droughts, wars, economic crisis etc.).
The poor often have limited or restricted access to resources: natural, physical or financial. Key amongst these is water-in terms of both quality and quantity. A great many of the poor men and women in urban, rural and peri-urban settings base their livelihoods on ‘informal activities’-----small-scale cropping, livestock rearing, agro-processing and other micro-enterprises.
In many of these activities, an adequate water supply is a crucial enabling resource: used in, or necessary for, the activity itself; freeing time (by reducing time spent collecting water); or as a key element in improved health that in turn enables people to work. Water supplies provided to households therefore have a huge potential to impact on poverty. This is particularly true for the poorest (and for women, who are in majority amongst the poorest).
Beyond public health concerns; water remains a productive resource which is defined (primarily with regard to the domestic water supply sector) as a quantity of water over and above domestic ‘basic needs’ that is used for small scale productive uses at the household level. Addressing the use of water for small-scale productive activities can reduce poverty by developing and managing water resources in a sustainable way and in ways that maximize the economic and social value added per unit volume supplied.
Lack of economic opportunities has often been cited as one contributory factor responsible the bourgeoning growth of slums in cities across the world, especially the developing world. Dwindling household incomes have necessitated the rise in various small-scale entrepreneurial activities in urban centers around the world, especially the third world.
In Nigeria, if water is a ladder in economic development with higher rungs representing steps up the path to economic well being, there are roughly 60% of households, who live lacking opportunities, initiatives, empowerment and support to get a foot on the first rung of the development ladder.
They are the poor; the ill and the jobless who are too hungry to even get a foot on the first rung of the water ladder. They may not all be dying today, but they are all fighting for survival each day. If they are not the victims of serious drought or flood, or an episode of serious illness, they are victims of communal clashes, bad governance, failed or neglected infrastructure, comatose utilities or a collapse of the Nigerian economy, the result is likely to be extreme suffering and perhaps even death. Cash earnings are kobos a day. The bulk of these people are found in urban centers with others spread in small towns and rural parts of Nigeria.
The hardest part of economic well being or wealth is getting the first foot on the water ladder. Households in Nigeria, a country at the bottom of the world’s income distribution, in poverty, tend to be stuck. The challenge for Nigeria’s democracy at all tiers of governance is to assist the poor and the disadvantaged to escape the misery of extreme poverty so that they may begin their own ascent up the ladder of economic well being which the ladder of good governance offers.
The end of poverty, in this sense, is not only the end of extreme suffering but also the beginning of economic progress and of hope and security that accompanies economic development. The end of extreme poverty is at hard-within Nigeria, but only if Nigerian leaders grasp the historic opportunity in front of them.
There already exists a bold set of commitments that is halfway to that target: the Millennium Development Goals, the eight goals that all 191 UN member states unanimously agreed to in 2002 by signing the United Nations Millennium declaration. These goals are important targets for cutting poverty in half by the year 2015, compared with a baseline of 1990.
They are bold but achievable, even though dozens of African countries are not yet on track to achieve them. They represent a crucial mid-station on the path to ending extreme poverty by the year 2025.
To meet the economic challenges of our time, we first have to understand the eminent place of water especially at the domestic level, where it is also put into active productive uses for income making. This does not in any way eclipse the interconnectedness of water to each of the goals of the MDGs.
Clean water means good health. Good health allows a child to go to school, or contributes to a person’s economic productivity. If the child goes to school, they will learn to better protect themselves from HIV/AIDS and other diseases later in life.
How then, do poor households respond when incomes decline, jobs becomes scarce and spending on food and services increases? Some households are more vulnerable than others, and not all cope equally well.
As Nigerian government and her development partners grapple with the problems of poverty in the country, an understanding of how the poor respond to economic crises has become increasingly important. This understanding can help ensure that interventions aimed at reducing poverty, complement and strengthen people’s own inventive solutions rather than substitute for or block them.
All over the world, the poor have always had strategies for the day-to-day coping with low incomes, high consumer prices, and inadequate or unreliable economic and social infrastructure. But to withstand sudden economic shocks or longer-term economic crises, households must be able to survive such periods without irreversible damage to the productive capacity of their members and their net asset position.
When asset bases become so depleted that even an upturn in the economy cannot reverse the damage, households are extremely vulnerable. The ability of households to avoid or reduce vulnerability and to increase economic productivity depends not only on their initial assets, but also on their ability to transform those assets into income, food, or other basic necessities effectively.
Assets can be transformed in two distinct ways: through the intensification of existing strategies and through the development of new or diversified strategies including the creative use of water, an example is the expanding local ‘pure water’ industry.
The onus lies with the government to safeguard water availability to households! |