Financing water for all – or for a few?

The World Water Council, which organizes the undemocratic, corporate controlled World Water Forum (read the dispatch from the Forum), commissioned a report on “Financing Water for All” for the 2006 Forum. A Task Force of mainly corporate executives and financiers pulled the report together – to think that a group like that can come up with democratic solutions to get water for all is absurd!!!

The report offers absolutely no new solutions for financing access to water for the poor – the people who actually lack access to water. The only, and not very original solution, is to increase aid flows. A message that has been heard over and over again – and enables governments to grandstand on the issue, but rarely results in real action to increase aid. The report instead focuses on solutions that might work in middle-income countries – solutions that are all based on richer countries blue prints for first class water delivery.

The panel also reiterates solutions offered by the last commission, chaired by the former Managing Director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, and somehow missed that even the World Bank has abandoned these solutions as unusable in the water sector. Maybe we should teach the Council and the panel a new word for the next panel and see if they can do better: Equity, a word which refers to principles of conscience, fairness and justice.