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WaterCan invited to serve as advisor to the Canadian Government for key United Nations Water and Sanitation Conference
WaterCan's Program Director George Yap was recently invited to serve as a development non-governmental organization representative and advisor to the Canadian delegation at the Twelfth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-12), which was held at the United Nations in New York from April 19 to 30, 2004. The Commission was created to monitor the implementation of Agenda 21 and other commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, Brazil, and it meets annually in New York to focus discussions on key sustainable development themes. As agreed by the international community at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, CSD-12 and next year's CSD-13 focuses on the topics of Water, Sanitation, and Human Settlements.
The Canadian delegation included senior officials from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Environment Canada, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), other federal agencies, as well as youth and First Nations representatives. "Being invited by the Canadian Government to serve as advisor to the delegation is a tremendous honour" said Yap. "It was an amazing opportunity to learn more about what different governments, donors and UN agencies, and other non-governmental organizations are doing - and failing to do - to help provide clean drinking water and sanitation to rural communities and the urban poor in developing countries."
CSD-12 was chaired by Mr. Borge Brende, Norway's Minister of the Environment. In addition to the main plenary sessions, this year's CSD included for the first time a Partnership Fair, a Learning Centre, and multiple side events, all of which were well attended. The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan officially opened the Ministers' session, which was attended by the Honourable David Anderson, Canada's Minister of the Environment.
One of the key messages that came out of CSD-12 related to finance. Many delegations and NGO representatives highlighted the fact many donor countries were not providing the resources required to achieve the internationally agreed-upon Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people who do not have access to safe water and sanitation by the year 2015.
One of Yap's personal CSD-12 highlights was the presentation given by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. In his trademark blunt and refreshingly undiplomatic manner, Dr. Sach's highlighted that nearly 60 developing countries, most found in Sub-Saharan Africa, are not on track for achieving the Millennium Development Goals, including the ones for water and sanitation. A major reason is because donors' past promises to support the MDGs are not being fulfilled. However, he believes that there is still time for every country to meet the MDGs through a combination of strong national policy planning and increased international support over a 10- to 12-year horizon through to 2015.
Given that the main purpose of CSD-12 was to provide a forum for sharing experience and to have frank discussions on the obstacles and challenges of implementing past water and sanitation promises rather than producing a negotiated settlement, many delegates were impressed by the interactive nature (by UN standards anyway) of the meetings.
During the Friday, 23 April official session on Sanitation, WaterCan's Program Director was invited to make a brief presentation to the assembly on behalf of the Canadian delegation on the importance of supporting community-based small-scale integrated water, sanitation, and hygiene initiatives to reach the poor. Such initiatives can go a long way to assist local governments' efforts to extend services into isolated rural areas, peri-urban areas and informal settlements, and other places where large scale, centrally-managed schemes would not be cost effective or desired. An important challenge is to determine how these initiatives can be replicated and scaled-up to district, regional and even national levels.
According to Yap, "the past ten years has been marked by a large number of notable international conferences on water and sanitation - CSD-12 being the most recent one - and they have helped to develop a growing international consensus on best practices for extending sustainable water and sanitation services to poor people." Despite this, repeated calls to donors and governments to significantly increase the amount of funds that must be made available to achieve the water and sanitation targets by 2015 appear to be falling on deaf ears. Worse yet, in recent years overall development aid to the water sector has actually been declining. Yap concludes that "if all the wonderful statements and promises repeatedly made at these international conferences don't quickly translate into increased aid flows, and local governments don't make water and sanitation a high priority within their national development plans, hundreds of millions of people in the developing world will continue to suffer from the devastating health effects of poor water and sanitation conditions."
To learn more about the work of the CSD, visit its official UN website at www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd. To read the Canadian government's position paper on Water, Sanitation and Human Settlements go to DFAIT's Sustainable Development website www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/sustain.