Opening speech by the Prince of Orange, Chairman, UNSGAB meeting
Amsterdam, 1 December 2009
Assistant Secretary-General Stelzer, State Secretary Huizinga, Mr Smits, ladies and gentlemen of the Board,
It is an honour and a pleasure to welcome you all to Amsterdam, a city of canals and bridges, where we are meeting to embark on a new course of action. This hotel, once Amsterdam's city hall, is a fitting venue for our meeting. My mother and father were married many years ago in this very room. So it is a place of hopeful beginnings and promises kept. May it strengthen our resolve to make great strides forward by 2012 and beyond.
Welcome as well to the Netherlands. My country may be small, but our achievements are not - especially when it comes to water management. We have had no choice. Our geography demands unrelenting attention to water. Europe's main rivers flow through our delta. Over half our population lives in areas that are below sea level. Now the sea is rising, the land is subsiding, and salt water is encroaching. Our constant efforts to use water to develop and build our society are a defining feature of our history and our national character. For the Netherlands, achieving water security has meant harnessing water's productive potential and limiting its destructive impact. Water security has always been a national priority and a precondition for our development. Thanks to civic participation, effective institutions, transparent collaboration between the public and private sectors, creative financing and state-of the-art infrastructure, we have reached this goal.
So I learned the importance of water security at a young age. I also learned that many countries around the world do not enjoy the benefits of sustainable water management. This has motivated me to devote time and energy to promoting sustainable water management as Chair of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. Of course, I am not alone. I know that all of you are deeply committed, for your own personal reasons, to improving water and sanitation for the millions of people who are still in need. I am proud of your efforts and of our common achievements.
Our achievements provide a good foundation to build on. We have heeded Kofi Annan's call to be action-oriented, to be highly visible, and to give sound, practical advice on water and sanitation to international actors. Our dedicated Vice-Chair, Uschi Eid, often reminds us of these three objectives. She also reminds us that we need to end taboos on sensitive issues and draw attention to neglected issues. To this end, we have developed the concept of Water Operators' Partnerships, now fully functional within UN-Habitat, to build capacity among operators. We have forged agreements with all the Regional Development Banks that boost their readiness to make water and sanitation loans. We have popularised the idea of sustainable cost recovery as a sound basis for strategic financial planning. We have helped sharpen and broaden global monitoring as an approach to water and sanitation. We have asked countries to report on their integrated water resources management. And we have created a High-Level Expert Panel on Water and Disaster which turned existing resolutions into a set of practical recommendations.
By all accounts the International Year of Sanitation was a resounding success. It gave villages, NGOs, activists and governments a much-needed tool to start the long and laborious process of breaking down the stigma of sanitation. Until now, it has been more acceptable to talk publicly about a sexually transmitted virus than about the safe disposal of human excrement. Unlike the campaigns against HIV/AIDS and other health crises, sanitation has few public advocates. Although 2.5 billion people still lack a safe, clean and private place to defecate with dignity, frank talk about sanitation still causes childish embarrassment. We all know that cultural norms are deeply engrained and changing them is difficult. But it is not impossible, and we are making progress. The International Year of Sanitation began changing social attitudes by launching public discussion of this silent, deadly crisis. I am proud of UNSGAB's work for a cause that has so few prominent advocates and gets so little public and political attention.
I think we can say with confidence that water and sanitation have climbed higher on global, regional and national agendas since UNSGAB started work in 2004. Perhaps we can take some credit for this. But we still have a long way to go. We are far from being on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal target for sanitation. And while it looks like the world will meet the target for drinking water, that is due to amazing progress in only a few countries. Progress towards this target has been very uneven.
At the recent Second Africa Water Week, I said that though the MDGs give a useful overview of the progress made, they do not tell the whole story. As we know, the MDG target calls for halving the percentage of people without safe water and basic sanitation. That is a far bigger challenge for countries that start from a very low percentage, and even harder if the population is growing rapidly. Both those facts apply to nearly every Sub-Saharan African country. By other measures, however, Africa is making impressive progress. For example, at least 17 African countries are outperforming the global average rate for expanding access to safe sanitation measured as a percentage of population. For water supply, 21 African countries are performing at or above the global average; for water and sanitation together, close to a third of them. This is clear from the UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Programme data. Yet it has not been adequately clear from global documents, meetings or official publications on MDG progress.
Failing to recognise Africa's genuine progress can lead to what's called 'Afro-pessimism'. We will consider this issue and others as we draw up our post-2015 agenda. It is critical to start thinking now about setting goals that give a clearer picture of the reality on the ground. We believe UNSGAB can make a contribution to this effort, as we describe in the section on monitoring of our new work plan.
We will welcome a number of interesting guests to our discussion today, and look forward to hearing the views of partners with expertise in all areas of our new work plan. Yesterday we discussed a candid, independent evaluation of our strengths and weaknesses. Now, as we set a renewed course for the future, we should reflect honestly on our shortcomings and build on our strengths. We need to revamp and reinvigorate our working arrangements and sharpen our focus so that our activities in sanitation, financing, monitoring and integrated water resources management have maximum impact. New challenges like climate change and the global financial crisis are making our job more difficult. We need to recognise these and other threats. But we should stay focused on the MDGs, which have gained global recognition due to discussions ranging from international to village level. We cannot allow this effort to fail. If we do, it will be difficult if not impossible to regain the momentum behind the MDGs.
I've mentioned some of our future monitoring activities. We have ambitious plans in other areas as well: sanitation, water resources management and financing. We will build on the success and momentum of the International Year of Sanitation by looking at 'the other side of sanitation': waste water collection, treatment and reuse. Only a fraction of waste water is treated in developing countries. As a result children die: 25% of child mortality under five can be traced to untreated sewage. We will work with partners to put water at the centre of efforts to adapt to climate change. We welcome the UN Economic Commission for Europe as a partner in promoting the UN Watercourses Convention. We will promote strategic financial planning at country level and step up our efforts to eliminate legal barriers to access to local currency debt markets for financing of water and sanitation projects.
I would like to thank the Dutch government for generously supporting the Board's work, as well as for hosting this meeting. I am proud to remind you that in 2005 the Dutch government pledged support over the next ten years to help provide 50 million people by 2015 with access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. According to the data, at our current rate of progress we will not only achieve but surpass that objective.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I spoke earlier of our common commitment to reaching the MDG targets for water and sanitation. But commitment and good intentions are not enough. As we move on from the Hashimoto Action Plan, we need clear, achievable objectives and effective partnerships to make a real contribution. Let us seek clarity and combine our strengths in the effort to provide safe water and basic sanitation to those still in need, so we can design the most effective interventions possible over the next two days. And let us sustain our commitment over these next critical years. 2015 is just around the corner, and we still have a lot of work to do.
Thank you.