1.1.1  “For 2012, highlight the practical implications of the Right to Water for practitioners by collecting and disseminating at least one example per category in each region of national policies targeting and delivering effectively better water quality,availability, accessibility, affordability at country level, all major components of the human right to drinking water.”

In July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the right to water and sanitation. For drinking water, in order to better understand the challenges in fulfilling this resolution, countries must first fully recognize the ever-changing patterns of demand (populations grow, settlement patterns change) as well as the needs of their vehicles for supply (principally through water supply delivery systems).

Furthermore, the Right to Water also considers four key dimensions: that drinking water should be safe, reliable (i.e. un-interrupted), accessible, and affordable. These four dimensions provide a useful way for measuring and qualifying the Right to Water.

Many countries throughout the world have considered or adopted constitutional amendments, created national policies, or passed laws in an attempt to address this concept of the Right to Water. However, these policy choices alone do not enhance the ability of service providers to achieve this mandate. At the same time, in many developing countries, provision of drinking water is not universal, may be interrupted on a regular basis, can be of poor quality (both water quality and service quality), and may be too costly for segments of the population. Many service providers, especially in the urban areas of developing countries, confront challenges in their service provision capacity, are faced with ageing infrastructure, require capital investments to extend services in fast growing cities, maintain high rates of non-revenue water (NRW) weakening long-term sustainability of services, do not have the ability to cover their operation and maintenance costs, maintain out-dated or inaccurate customer cadastres, and are subject to political interference that undermines the commercial viability of the service provision. In rural areas, where access to drinking water is typically lower and where an estimated 750 million people worldwide lack access to drinking water (JMP 2008), a variety of small private and community schemes face other challenges (cost recovery, operation and maintenance, technical and managerial constraints) in providing service provision that can be sustained over the long-term to address the changing patterns of demand over time.

In many countries already facing both existing deficits (lack of universal coverage of safe, affordable, and un-interrupted drinking water), and service providers that are not commercially viable or sustainable in the long-run, the introduction of policies and mandates requiring access to drinking water as a human right presents an additional layer of challenges.

To achieve the right to water, countries will require well functioning service delivery systems that can provide universal access over time, and therefore adjust to a series of variables that continue to evolve as their populations grow and adopt different settlement patterns (e.g., migration to cities, growing importance of secondary cities, consolidation of concentrated settlements in rural areas).

This Target 1.1.1 will “highlight the practical implications of the Right to Water for practitioners by collecting and disseminating at least one example per category in each region of national policies targeting and delivering effectively better water quality, availability, accessibility, affordability at country level, all major components of the human right to drinking water.”

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