Water Pakistan

Hear is a proposed title for a research report at masters level in Pakistan,

Read carefully and discuss with group members (three), Pakistans national drinking water policy at the given link and search more. http://www.crcp.org.pk/PDF%20Files/National_DrinkingWater_Policy.pdf

1. basic properties of a policy

2. strong points of the policy

3. weak points of the policy

4. connections with related documents

5. Targets for MDGs and national level

6. what impact it wll have if implemented

7. your real assessment of the document

Time . three months

submit report and present results

Total grades 25 marks to wards final score

write your comments and issues on this web and have seniors opinion

Is the water sector sexy enough?

The Guardian the other day posted an article which claimed that water and sanitation projects are not sexy enough and that donors therefore are not willing to invest in them. According to various interviewees in the article, donors prefer to invest in schools or clinics, rather than in “unsexy” water projects. The interviewees call for an increase in donor funding for water and sanitation. Rather than sexying up the sector, I think the water sector should be a bit careful in what it is asking for, as more money is not necessarily the solution to the problem, and may even reinforce the donor dependency in the sector.

The article mentions that donor aid to water and sanitation has gone down in relative terms compared to the percentage of aid dedicated to the health and education sectors. In 1995, 7% of all aid budgets went to water and sanitation; in 2004, it was 4%. In the same period the percentage of aid for education went up from 5 to 6.5% and health really had a boom growing from 7 to 11%. However, and this is the BIG however, in absolute terms aid to water and sanitation has nearly doubled from 3.7 billion US$ in 1998 year to 7.4 billion US$ in 2008. The water and sanitation sector benefited from the overall growth in aid; it is just that the health and education sectors benefited even more. My question is whether the interviewees in the Guardian article would also like to have seen the percentage of aid going up in relative terms? In my view there is no justification for or against that. Nobody will deny that investments in health are just as much neede! d in as investments in water and sanitation, or roads or any other development sector. The question is how much should go to each sector. Should 7% of all global aid be spent on water and sanitation and only 5% on education? Or should it be the other way around? I don’t think that anyone has the correct answer to this, and we should therefore stop making these kinds of comparisons with other sectors.

More importantly, little analysis is provided why aid to water and sanitation has gone down.

Is it indeed, as the article claims, that water and sanitation is less sexy than schools? Ok I am biased, but surely the idea of providing people with a borehole or a tap is something that would appeal to tax payers in developed countries and officers at development agencies. You put some money on the table, get some contractors to drill a borehole, put a pump on top, and you will soon have a photograph of happy children getting fresh water.

Shouldn’t that be at least as appealing as putting some money on the table, get some contractors to build a school, put some tables and chairs in and take a photograph of happy children learning the alphabet? I cannot imagine that the sexiness argument is real (apart from sanitation, because who likes to see pictures of toilets on posters of a charity at the railway station, even if they are nicely built ones?).

If it is not the sexiness argument, is it then maybe something else?

Maybe recipient countries, utilities and user themselves have increased their spending on water and sanitation, reducing the need for donor contributions? The answer to this cannot be given, as, unlike donor money, these other sources of funding are very hard to track at a global level. The GLAAS report with the figures on donor financing, has little data on how much governments themselves are investing and no data on how much is invested by other parties. Last year’s study on infrastructure investments in Africa by the World Bank showed that aid is still a smaller source of financing of water and sanitation infrastructure than household’s own investments, and is more or less of the same order of magnitude as government contribu! tions. However, there is very little data on trends in these investments. So, we cannot say whether other sources of finance are taking up the place of aid in the water and sanitation sector.

Maybe the trends in what donors finance are quite random anyway, so we shouldn’t attach too much value to the percentages from one year to another? That could very well be the case. There is an unmistakable upward trend in aid for water and sanitation in absolute terms and a downward trend for the relative share, but the graphs plotting there trends have their peaks and valleys (just as the graphs for the education and health sectors by the way).

Or, could it be that the water sector is not very good of making effective use of the funds that are available? Probably this is part of the issue as well. In the Triple-S study we did we found shocking figures of the percentages of budgets for water and sanitation actually being used in a financial year, in some countries as low as 45%. Absorption capacity is a big bottleneck in aid in general, and the water sector is not an exception. Whether it is better or worse in the water sector than in health or education, I don’t know (would be interesting if someone has the figures). But it is clear that in a number of countries, there is little use in putting more money into the sector, until the absorption capacity goes up.

For these, and probably many other, reasons, I think the water sector should be a bit careful in asking for more money. As water sector professionals, we first have a responsibility to make sure that existing funds are used effectively. In addition, care should be taken not to ask this money, once again, from donors. We all know how donor dependent the water sector is in many of the countries. As one of my colleagues from Zimbabwe often repeats “the government here thinks that WASH is for donors”. The water sector, maybe unintentionally helps in maintaining that image. The GLAAS report, from which many of the figures above are taken, telling first presents the data of aid spending on water and sanitation, and then the data of government spending. The former are also analysed in much more detail in terms of how that money is used, for what purpose etc. As donors are becoming more and more serious about the aid effectiveness agenda, and! particularly government leadership in that, we should also expect more clarity on what governments could and should do themselves. Calls for more investment in the water and sanitation sector should therefore as much be made towards governments as to donors. And as a minimum, a call should be made for making it clearer who is investing how much in water and sanitation, and how that compares to the needs. We first need to get a clear picture of all the parts of the puzzle, before we can ask for more. That may not be a very sexy message to put forward in newspaper articles or advocacy events. Yet, I believe that a dull, but well-organised water sector which has its house in order, will be sexy enough to attract financing.

Stef Smits, Programme Officer, South Asia and Latin America Team, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre

This opinion piece was originally published in the Triple-S water services that last blog on 11 July 2011

source   https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/1312e7749a47ea19

The terms Improved drinking water and sanitation are hard to understand objectively. WHO/UNICEF joint monitoring program have tried to explain it a little forward. To asses the progress on MDGs we need to unpack the definitions of Improved Drinking water supply and Improved Sanitation. This is important to Evaluate access to MDGs on a uniform level, globally.
As a step Farther the term Reducing to Half the access to those having no reach to improved quality of water and sanitation is not very objective, as the number of existing sufferers , not having improved drinking water and sanitation for each country, zone and region needs to be defined on credible basis.
Kindly Feel Free to discuss.
The drinking-water and sanitation ladders
Since its development in the 2008 report, this ladder allows JMP to show what is considered improved and unimproved in a more refined way than the only pass/fail former presentation without changing the MDG definitions. This ladder currently allows a disaggregated analysis of trends in a three rung ladder for drinking-water and a four-rung ladder for sanitation as shown to the right.
For sanitation, this gives an understanding of the proportion of population globally with no sanitation facilities at all, of those reliant on technologies defined by JMP as “unimproved,” of those sharing sanitation facilities of otherwise acceptable technology, and those using “improved” sanitation facilities.
Similarly, the water ladder has been prepared showing the global proportion of those using unimproved water sources, those using “improved” sources other than piped household connections and those benefiting from household connections in a dwelling, plot or yard.
These refinements allow countries and the international community to form a clearer understanding of the situation of access to water and sanitation (learn more about JMP and country collaborations). As definitional differences are often the prime cause for discrepancies in the estimates between country figures and JMP estimates, the ladder tries to show where this discrepancy precisely is coming from. This new way of analysing access has become an essential tool for data reconciliation at national level, between the different stakeholders and especially sector agencies and national statistics offices, as well as between the national level and JMP.
Source  http://www.wssinfo.org/definitions-methods/watsan-ladder/

LAHORE: Senior Advisor to Chief Minister Punjab Sardar Zulfiqar Ali Khan Khosa has said that a comprehensive Punjab Water Policy would be evolved in order to provide clean drinking water to the people of the province and strategy, planning and financial resources would be made available for provision of clean drinking water.

He expressed these views during a briefing given by the Housing Urban Development and Public Health Engineering Department regarding Punjab Drinking Water Policy. Members Assembly, officers of Public Health Engineering, Finance and Environment Departments attended the meeting. Zulfiqar Ali Khosa said that after the 18th amendment, environment pollution is now the responsibility of the provinces and Punjab Assembly will undertake legislation for environmental pollution and specially provision of clean drinking water to the masses. The meeting was informed that polluted water is being used by a major chunk of the population in the province and poisonous articles of arsenic have been detected in the water of Lahore, Kasur, Multan, Rahim Yar Khan and Bahawalpur while one lakh and sixteen thousand children die every year in the province due to polluted water. Sardar Zulfiqar Khosa informed that provision of clean drinking water to the citizens is of fundamental importance and the participation of people in these schemes would be ensured and monitoring system of water supply schemes would be evolved. He further said that currently WASA and local government institutions are providing water while under Punjab Water Policy, WASA and other local government institutions would make investment for better storage facilities of water while water purification scheme would also be implemented with the cooperation of WASA.

Link   http://pmlni.com/newsRead.aspx?newsID=1624

The start of a capacity building institute is a step in the right direction though late. We need to define our needs very clearly lest this institute also becomes a show piece.

It should be working towards
1. Practical, affordable and locally manageable technologies to wards sewerage water treatment and use.
2. Reasonable drinking water treatment methods
Design, manage and locally fabricate the above two initiatives.

3.Quick testing for microbiological safety of drinking water
4.Standards for pipes, and sanitary fittings
5. Design for domestic sanitation pit

Cont
M Jahangir
Islamabad

Surce http://thenews.com.pk/27-11-2010/islamabad/17554.htm
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Mumtaz Alvi
Islamabad
Pakistan with only 16 percent out of 12,000 water supply schemes providing safe water for human consumption is soon to have a National Capacity Building Institute of Water Quality Management.
A South Korean team of experts has arrived in Pakistan to finalise the details for the first ever project of its nature in this part of the world. The friendly country will be bearing the cost (US $213 million) and building the four-storey institute within the premises of Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) here.
Presently, all the civic bodies including Wasa, Public Health Engineering and Local Government mechanism have technical hands but they are not specifically educated and trained diploma holders to ensure water quality fit for human consumption.
The Korean team will be holding discussions with the Minister of Science and Technology Azam Swati, Secretary Irfan Nadeem and also visit the PCRWR head office here regarding the proposed institute.
Talking to The News here, PCRWR Chairman Dr. Muhammad Aslam Tahir confirmed that South Koreans had agreed to one of the two projects, they had proposed, billing this development a major breakthrough in water sector.
“In over 6 decades, we have not been able to set up an institute, which should offer three-year diploma in water and waste water and today our civil engineers tend to work with water supply projects, but they lack even basic know-how about their job and the situation in other Muslim countries is also not much different from us,” he said.
He said that a set policy in the West was that extensive courses were offered and utmost importance was given to water-related knowledge. Dr. Tahir noted an improved water quality was key to boosting average age in the advanced countries and good results could be achieved in Pakistan as well by giving due attention to this important sector.
Replying to a question, he said that poor drinking quality was mainly responsible for low average in Pakistan and pointed out one of the basic problems was with the water supply schemes, as most of these were neither properly planned nor constructed.

Core Features Of The National Water Drinking Polices.

National Drinking Water Policy. http://www.environment.gov.pk/NEP/DWPolicyOct2009.pdf

National Drinking Water Policy.(Our Comments).

Drinking water policy of Bangladesh.

Workshop Notes NDWQS 6-8 NOV.