Water for All

Poor water access particularly affects women and girls
Poor water access particularly affects women and girls
Photo: JA!
Inequitable access to water, especially for growing crops, is a major factor in global poverty, and a death sentence for millions each year. Ending this unacceptable situation will require a radically new approach to investing in water infrastructure. The major engineering works that dominated 20th century water management has been discounted for its technical and economic failures, for benefiting the well-off at the expense of the poor, and for its massively negative impacts on ecosystems. Water mismanagement contributes toward food insecurity for the world’s 800 million undernourished people and the poverty of the more than half of the world’s people who survive on less than two dollars a day.

Affordable technologies that can raise the yields of small farmers are essential for increasing food production, poverty alleviation, and economic growth in the poorest countries. Small farmers, most of who live on rain-fed lands, make up the great majority of the world’s extremely poor people. Raising their yields requires water
Rajendra Singh beside a check dam in Rajasthan
Rajendra Singh beside a check dam in Rajasthan
Patrick McCully
management strategies such as rainwater harvesting, affordable drip irrigation and pump technologies, and farming techniques that reduce water needs while increasing yields. Low-cost community-based technologies are essential to meeting the UN's poverty reduction goal of halving the number of people without access to safe water and basic sanitation.

Around the world, NGOs and community activists are taking steps to bring clean water and low-tech irrigation to poor communities. Says Rajendra Singh, whose organization has helped build rainwater harvesting structures for thousands of poor farmers in arid Rajasthan, India: "Our struggle is not only against dams, our struggle is to meet the needs of the people."