IWA signs agreements with USAID and UN-Habitat

At the 5th World Water Forum in Instanbul, the International Water Association (IWA) signed agreements with USAID and UN-Habitat.

USAID and IWA will work to strengthen water utilities and their regional associations, in particular the Arab Countries Water Utility Association (ACWUA). Read more.

IWA an UN-Habitat signed a deal on promoting partnerships among water operators globally, regionally and nationally, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mr. Paul Reiter, IWA Executive Director, said:  “We are jointly driving a change agenda through the deployment and communication of the Water Operators Partnerships programme”.

Web sites:

• IWA - Water Operators Partnerships
• UN-Habitat - Global Water Operators Partnerships Alliance

Source: UN-Habitat, 25 Mar 2009

Dr. Fadia Daibes Murad: Palestinian water law and policy expert dies in car crash

Fadia Daibes Murad. Photo: DanChurchAid

Palestinian water law and policy expert, Dr. Fadia Daibes Murad, has died in a car crash on her way back from the Water Forum in Istanbul to Ramallah. “Fadia was an important defender of the water rights of Palestine women and men, so intelligent, and full of energy”, says Joke Muylwijk, Executive Director of the Gender and Water Alliance (GWA). Dr. Daibes Murad had been in Istanbul, representing the GWA at the 5th World Water Forum on the topic of water and conflict, contributing from a gender perspective. Read her statement here.

Dr. Daibes Murad was the Regional Representative for DanChurchAid in Ramallah, Palestine. She got her PhD degree in 2004 from the UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science in Dundee, UK. She then worked for eight years with the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) and later became a freelance water law and policy consultant, specialising in the water conflict between Israel and Palestine.

See below a video interview she gave at the 5th World Water Forum.

Source: GWA, 25 Mar 2009

Indian Sanitation Innovator & Social Reformer Awarded 2009 Stockholm Water Prize

Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak. Photo: Sulabh International Social Service Organisation)

Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh Sanitation Movement in India, has been named the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate. As the Founder of the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, Dr. Pathak is known around the world for his wide ranging work in the sanitation field to improve public health, advance social progress, and improve human rights in India and other countries. His accomplishments span the fields of sanitation technology, social enterprise, and healthcare education for millions of people in his native country, serving as a model for NGO agencies and public health initiatives around the world. Since he established the Sulabh Sanitation Movement in 1970, Dr. Pathak has worked to change social attitudes toward traditional unsanitary latrine practices in slums, rural villages, and dense urban districts, and developed cost effective toilet systems that have improved daily life and health for millions of people. He has also waged an ongoing campaign to abolish the traditional practice of manual “scavenging” of human waste from bucket latrines in India while championing the rights of former scavengers and their families to economic opportunity, decent standards of living, and social dignity.

Read more: SIWI, 25 Mar 2009

WaterAid staff member receives Mali ‘MBE’ award

WaterAid's Fatoumata with the President of Mali, Amadou Toumani Toure. Credit: Charlie Bibby/FT

The President of Mali has recognised the work of WaterAid [staff member] Fatoumata Haidara by awarding her with a prestigious Chevalier de L’Ordre National – Mali’s equivalent to the British MBE honour.

The award, which was given to Fatoumata on 19 January [2009] after a successful third Local Millennium Development Goals Initiative conference in Mali, notes WaterAid’s contribution to the water and sanitation sector in improving access to water, sanitation and improved hygiene for poor and marginalised citizens.

Read more: WaterAid, 03 Feb 2009

John Kalbermatten, “Low-cost sanitation champion”, 1931-2009

John Kalbermatten. Photo: Connell Funeral Home

John Kalbermatten, 77, former Senior Water & Wastes Advisor at the World Bank, died on Thursday, 26 February 2009. Born in Luzern, Switzerland, he worked as a professional engineer for the city of Bethlehem, USA, the World Health Organization, retiring from the World Bank in 1986. John continued as a private consultant for 14 years.

In his blog, Prof. Duncan Mara writes:  “low-cost Sanitation has lost its greatest Champion”. Realising that the World Bank’s “investments in sewerage were not reaching the poor, [Kalbermatten] persuaded the Bank to fund the 1976-78 low-cost sanitation research project”, says Mara. “This produced some truly ground-breaking publications – for example, the three books on Appropriate Sanitation Alternatives [...] – some people, including some sector ‘specialists’, are even now “reinventing” quite a bit of what’s in the first two, simply because they haven’t read them (and probably don’t know about them)”, Mara continues. (More references to publications by John Kalbermatten can be found in IRCDOC).

“John then obtained funds from UNDP in 1978 for project GLO/78/006 for the Technology Advisory Group (TAG), which he established, to start putting the lessons of the research project into practice. TAG’s successor today is the Water and Sanitation Program. Maggie Black’s 1999 publication 1978-1998: Learning What Works – A 20 Year Retrospective View on International Water and Sanitation Cooperation details the work of TAG.

View John Kalbermatten’s guest book on the Connell Funeral Home web page.

Singapore prize for Dutch water scientist

Prof. Gatze Lettinga. Photo: Hans Dijkstra, bvBeeld.

Professor Gatze Lettinga from The Netherlands has been awarded the 2009 Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize for his Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket Reactor (UASB) technology.

His revolutionary treatment concept, which stood out among 39 international nominations, enables industrial used water to be purified cost-effectively and produces renewable energy, fertilizers and soil conditioners. Professor Lettinga has chosen not to patent this invention so that his water treatment technology can be universally available. As a result, his technology has been widely adopted in industrial as well as municipal use [in countries like Brazil and India]. Today, the technology is in use in almost 3,000 reactors, representing about 80 percent of all anaerobic used water treatment systems in the world.

[...] The Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize is an international award recognising an individual or organisation for outstanding contributions in the field of water. [...] Named after Singapore’s first Prime Minister and present Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, the award comes with a cash prize of SGD 300,000 [US$ 194,000 = € 154,000], an award certificate and a gold medallion. The award is sponsored by the Singapore Millennium Foundation, a philanthropic body supported by Temasek Holdings that has pledged SGD1.5 million over five years since 2008. The award ceremony and banquet will be held at the Istana – the official residence and office of Singapore’s President – on 24 June 2009 during the second Singapore International Water Week. Professor Lettinga will deliver the Singapore Water Lecture at the Water Week on 23 June.

Source: Singapore International Water Week, 09 March 2009

Shashi Tharoor: former UN Under-Secretary General responds to accusations of anti-Cola activitists

Shashi Tharoor. Photo: ShashiTharoor.com

In an open letter to Shashi Tharoor, activists from his native state of Kerala in India, accuse the former UN Under-Secretary General of “insensitivity and unconcern to align with the criminal Coca-Cola against the people of Plachimada”. Mr. Tharoor is a member of the Advisory Board of Yatn, the Coca-Cola India Foundation. In 2004, activists convinced local officials in Kerala to shut down the Coca Cola bottling plant in Plachimada, which was blamed for a drastic decline in both quantity and quality of water available to local farmers and villagers.

In his response, Mt. Tharoor stressed that “Foundation is financed by the Coca-Cola Company as part of its corporate social responsibility”and that his “membership of the Foundation’s Advisory Board aims at promoting [...] a number of concrete projects, particularly in the area of safe drinking water”. Although he does “not represent the company in any way”, Tharoor said he “inquired into the matter to satisfy” himself “that these allegations [against Coca Cola] had been thoroughly examined [and largely refuted] by the competent authorities”. “Finally, with regard to the discontinuation of the supply of drinking water by the company”, Tharoor continued “I note that this supply in fact continued till December 2007, almost four years after the plant’s forced closure, but that it was not practical for the company to continue beyond that date in view of its lack of operations in the area”.

Addressing the activists, Tharoor writes that “the only result of your agitation over the Plachimada plant has been to close down an investment worth over Rs 80 crores in our state, which provided direct employment to 400 people and indirect employment to more than 5000 persons, including transporters, construction workers, and distributors. While all these people are now out of a job, no one has benefited from your continued protests. Instead, the image of Kerala as a place in which it is unwise for businesses to invest has been reinforced”. [...] “And instead of being dismayed by my service in such a Foundation, I urge you to applaud whatever help the other Advisory Board members and I can provide to steer the Foundation’s resources towards helping people on issues like safe drinking water, energy resources, waste management, and the development of backward areas”.

The text of “An Open Letter to Shashi Tharoor” and Tharoors response are available here.

See also Wikipedia’s page on Criticism of Coca-Cola and Coca Cola’s own page on its operations in India.

USA: Men convicted in water-equipment bribery scheme

The owner of a Tennessee-based water treatment equipment company and a former civilian employee of the US Army were convicted in federal court in Atlanta on February 19 in a bribery scheme involving contracts worth US$ 66 million to provide water to US troops overseas, according to federal prosecutors. From 2001 to 2007, Mack S. Smith, owner of WATEC, Inc, paid a total of about $549,700 to Richard E. Long, a civilian water and petroleum program manager for the Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson, near Atlanta.

Read more: WaterTech Online.com, 20 Feb 2009