International Development Committee
Oral evidence: WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene), HC 1174
Tuesday 28 February 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 February 2023.
Members present: Sarah Champion (Chair); Mr Richard Bacon; Theo Clarke; Mrs Pauline Latham; Chris Law; Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger; Kate Osamor; Mr Virendra Sharma.
Questions 1 - 38
Witnesses
I: Tim Wainwright, Chief Executive, WaterAid; Dr Nick Hepworth, Executive Director, Water Witness; Anjil Adhikari, Acting Head of Programme and Partnership and Thematic Lead, WASH and Water Governance, Oxfam in Nepal; Md. Abdul Alim, Head of Humanitarian Programme, ActionAid.
Witnesses: Tim Wainwright, Dr Nick Hepworth, Anjil Adhikari and Md. Abdul Alim.
Q1 Chair: I would like to open this International Development Committee one-off evidence session on WASH—water, sanitation and hygiene—which is one of the absolute backbones of any humanitarian or development project.
We are joined by four witnesses, two in the room and two remotely. Could I ask you to briefly introduce yourselves?
Tim Wainwright: I am Tim Wainwright, chief executive of WaterAid.
Dr Hepworth: I am Nick Hepworth, executive director of Water Witness International.
Anjil Adhikari: I am Anjil Adhikari. I am the acting head of programme and partnerships for Oxfam in Nepal.
Md. Abdul Alim: This is Abdul Alim. I am the head of humanitarian programmes for ActionAid Bangladesh.
Q2 Chair: I know it is quite late for you gentlemen so we appreciate you staying up for us. Thank you very much.
I will direct my first question to Tim. How important is water, sanitation and hygiene to development?
Tim Wainwright: Thank you to the Committee for putting the time into what is, as you described, such a backbone issue. Yes, it is utterly fundamental to development. It is in a very worrying state at the moment. To summarise quickly, 1.7 billion people in the world are without sanitation. Close to 800 million are without water. Globally, 30% of all schools—not just schools in poorer countries—do not have water. Two-thirds of healthcare facilities in low-income countries lack the facilities for hygiene, handwashing and so on.
The implications of that are very serious. If I just run through some examples of this, in the health sector we are all aware that access to water, sanitation and hygiene is an absolute fundamental of any approach to public health. I will just pick out a few examples. There are cholera outbreaks across many parts of Africa at the moment. WASH is the No.1 intervention. AMR is set to be the biggest killer in this country by 2050.
Chair: What is AMR?
Tim Wainwright: That is antimicrobial resistance. What is the most cost-effective intervention we can make on reducing the use of antibiotics? It is water, sanitation and hygiene. A third example is sepsis, which causes 20% of deaths worldwide. The key intervention is water, sanitation and hygiene. The list goes on.
On education, I am sure we are all very aware of the threat to attendance that lack of adequate hygiene poses to young girls when they are on their periods. A third of girls in south Asia miss up to three days a month of schooling because of this. I am sure the figures are similar or worse across Africa. The whole gender equity agenda must be underpinned by a really strong approach to water, sanitation and hygiene.
If you look more generally at water, including WASH and access to drinking water, in relation to economic development, usually 70% to 80% of water is used by agriculture. We need water to make food. It is used by industry as well as by people.
It also underpins national security. Last summer, Kamala Harris oversaw a change in US policy that redefined the global definition of national security in the eyes of the American Government to include access to drinking water. If the citizens of a country do not have access to drinking water, it is a marker of instability. She has very recently spoken on this. You can see the food-energy-water nexus playing out in east Africa at the moment.
I am just giving you snapshots, but it just is an absolute development fundamental. If it is missing, it puts at risk pretty much any other investment you might make in development.
Chair: Thank you very much. That was very comprehensive.
Q3 Mrs Latham: Tim Wainwright and Dr Nick Hepworth, how close is the international community to achieving SDG 6 on the availability of safe water and sanitation for all by 2030?
Tim Wainwright: We are not very close. In most of the countries WaterAid is working in, at current rates of progress we are talking about more like 100 years than seven. The progress made in the MDGs on water was reasonably good. In sanitation and hygiene it was absolutely appalling. We are still a long way behind.
There are various factors that mean the situation probably could get worse rather than better. One is climate change. Look at recent events, such as the flooding in Pakistan. WASH is a very big issue in Pakistan. When the floods happen where there is badly managed sanitation, you get contamination and so on. There was the drought in east Africa. Climate change tends to affect human beings because there is either too much or too little water. It is at the centre of the adaptation side of climate change.
Rising sea levels in Bangladesh are putting huge numbers of people in the coastal communities of Bangladesh at risk of salination of their water sources. Climate change is definitely making things worse. If you want to equip a community to survive climate change, they absolutely have to have water.
Another one I would pick out is rapid urbanisation. Small towns, which represent the fastest-urbanising population in the world, are doubling in size every 15 years. That puts intense pressure on communities. When you get a concentration of people, sometimes it is unofficial—it is not classed as urban, but it is, because the people have moved—so you do not have the service infrastructure in place, but you have increased risk of disease as people are living close together and so on. These are just some of the factors that are making it harder rather than easier.
Finally, I would say we are in an environment of chronic underinvestment. With the ODI, we estimated that, if you wanted to hit SDG 6, it would cost something of the order of £250 billion a year in investment between now and 2030. This is in low-income countries. We are talking about needing trillions of dollars of investment to do this.
You are looking surprised. It is a mixture of big investments in infrastructure and service maintenance. It is a serious business. If you think what we invest in this country, it is a serious business, getting a reliable water supply.
Dr Hepworth: As Tim says, the targets on WASH are way off. One in four still lack access to safely managed water. Almost half of humanity lacks safely managed sanitation. Only about half of all waste water is treated.
The indicator I want to zoom into is integrated water resource management. We call this the wheelhouse of water security. It is the management of water resources so there is enough water for farming, domestic use and industry, pollution is controlled and there is adequate planning for droughts and floods.
The indicator in the SDG, the UN figures, shows that, despite the global commitment to have integrated water resource management implemented by all countries made in 2002 at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, only 54% of countries globally are anywhere near implementation. In Africa, that is down to about 46%.
We see that on the ground. The institutions required to manage water effectively, to protect people from droughts and floods and to allocate water to prevent water conflicts simply are not there or do not have the resources or the political authority needed to do that important work. The UN shows that the funding simply is not there. Our assessments show that water management institutions have about 10% of the money they need to do the job effectively.
With the right kind of reform, that can change. A lot of water management can be self-financing, if we get the pricing and value of water right. That is an area where UK expertise can lean in and help fix these systems so that they are self-financing and sustainable into the future. What is needed is structural support, stronger systems and targeted finance, including by the UK.
Water problems primarily impact the poor and the powerless. That is why action has not been taken to date. It is my hope that committees like this Committee can change that. We need the UK to make water a global priority, to demonstrate the global leadership that is needed and to mobilise the reform and investment that are needed to fix the water security gap.
Q4 Mrs Latham: I want to go on to key targets and indicators, but there is a problem. Say you are in a developing country and you do not have piped water to anywhere; it is only boreholes. You are talking about the pricing and value of water being correct. Those people cannot afford to buy water at all.
Dr Hepworth: That is a really good point. Here is the thing. We are not looking to raise the price of water for everybody. There are companies in those places that use water for free, including those that provide our food, our clothes and the stuff we use every day.
Some new analysis presented at UN-Water shows that 71% of the UK’s water footprint lies outside the UK; 71% of the water we need to feed and clothe ourselves is other people’s water. Our analysis also shows that 40% of that water is used unsustainably, degrading and depleting other people’s water resources and making them more vulnerable to climate change. We need to change that.
Q5 Mr Bacon: Where does that 71% come from?
Dr Hepworth: That is the water that is required to grow the food we eat.
Mr Bacon: I understood that. I am asking where it came from. I did not get the source.
Dr Hepworth: I can share the analysis. It goes across the world: India, Pakistan, across Africa and the US.
Q6 Chair: Whose research is it?
Dr Hepworth: It was done by Ashok Chapagain and Mesfin Mekonnen, who have led the methodology around water footprinting. We commissioned it.
Q7 Mr Bacon: Can you just explain what you mean by “water footprinting”? You take the water required for the mangetout that we flew in from Peru or whatever it is and add all of that up. That is how you get to your 71%.
Dr Hepworth: That is exactly right; you have got it. Peru and mangetout is right on the nose. When we investigate the impact of that footprint, we see there is water abuse in our supply chains. That needs to change.
Q8 Mrs Latham: Going back to the key targets and indicators, are there any specific ones that we are definitely not on track to meet? If you turn it around, are there any that we are definitely on track to meet?
Tim Wainwright: I am not aware of any we are on track to meet.
Dr Hepworth: No.
Tim Wainwright: I am very worried about water in the world.
Q9 Mrs Latham: Which is the closest?
Tim Wainwright: Certain countries have made significant progress. In Africa, for instance, Rwanda is potentially one such country. Yes, perhaps I am being too gloomy. There are certain countries where you can see that they might hit some of the SDGs before 2030. Yes, definitely. Rwanda is an example.
Can I come back on your earlier point, Pauline, though? You were asking about the ability to pay. In WaterAid’s experience, all over the world, unless people are extremely poor within their community, there is often a willingness to pay a very reasonable sum for a piped water supply. Previously, without that piped water supply, you are buying bottled water. It is the only thing that will not make you and your family sick. That is vastly more expensive.
You see an enormous change in the economics of water, if it is provided to communities. It is a very important principle because water systems need an income flow to maintain them.
Mrs Latham: If you are buying bottles of water, that is not sustainable.
Tim Wainwright: It is wrong on many counts, yes.
Q10 Mrs Latham: It is. There are very poor communities that cannot possibly afford to pay for their water. Are you suggesting that the companies we buy things from that are importing stuff pay over the odds to sustain those very poor communities?
Tim Wainwright: I will give you an example. I visited Ethiopia fairly recently. There is a water utility, which is an arm’s length public body. That is the way they manage their water system. It was reaching a population of about 75,000 people in small urban and rural areas. This was not in the capital city; it was in a poor part of Ethiopia.
Most of the people were paying for water and were happy to pay for it. The turnover of that entity had increased by a factor of six. The number of people that it was serving had doubled. It was being done in a sensitive way. It would meet the principles you are talking about, Nick, in terms of the wider management of the river basin it was working in.
Only a very few people in that community required a cross-subsidy. You can also see agriculture and industry being part of it. You want to see all the water users paying a fair contribution, having it well managed and having good oversight from Government. These are the success stories we are trying to build up. There are too few of them, which is why I am highlighting the issue, but it can be done.
Dr Hepworth: I am just back from Kenya, where I looked at the impact of flower and horticulture production for UK supermarkets in Naivasha basin and Ewaso basin. We found that the companies there are doing very well. They are doing good business and using water almost for free, while, cheek by jowl, communities are facing cholera and hunger because of a lack of water or water storage.
The Kenyan Government are saying, “We will increase the tariff for those commercial water users to plough back into investment in the catchment for storage and for the management of the resource for those poorer communities”. That is exactly how the system should work.
The problem in Kenya was that the Kenya Flower Council was taking the Government to court for trying to put the price of water up. That is not what is needed. We need the companies that provide us to be responsible in their water stewardship and pay a fair price.
Q11 Mrs Latham: Do you see any targets that we are going to hit?
Dr Hepworth: I do not, but I see an opportunity for real hope. That is an initiative called the Declaration for Fair Water Footprints, led by the UK, which has made commitments across Governments in the north and south, companies and banks to make sure our water footprints do not cause problems. That is about making sure they are fair, that by 2030 they cause zero pollution and that there are sustainable withdrawals, universal WASH access, planning for droughts and floods, and the protection of nature. That is going ahead.
The UK needs to put its money where its mouth is and make sure there is funding to deliver those commitments. That is a really positive step forward. It represents the leadership the world needs on water.
Anjil Adhikari: My experience regarding the pricing of water has been a bit different. I can speak at least from the Nepal side. In Nepal, we have lots of water resources in terms of drinking water, but these water sources are a bit far from residential areas. The initial discussions about tariffs were a bit tricky because people grew up seeing water flowing freely. After 2015, when there was a major earthquake in Nepal and many water systems collapsed, people realised that they needed to have a certain amount of funding in place to fix problems quickly. That is when the whole idea of the tariff ignited, with water being free at the source but not free when it comes to your home.
Having said that, there are always certain communities or certain households that may not be able to pay the minimum tariff that is required. That is why we always keep it in mind that there should be certain packages of subsidy for those households that are not able to afford it.
There is a bit of a different scenario in the flatlands of Nepal, where people mostly use handpumps. When they have handpumps in place and they can easily access water, they are a bit sceptical about switching to a piped water supply system, where they have to pay a tariff. Although using these handpumps may mean there is arsenic in the water, they are a bit sceptical about moving to tariffs.
We need to work with them a bit and engage with them in terms of behaviour change for quite a period of time, to make them understand what they are paying for and how they are spending more money on health issues by not committing to high-quality water.
Chair: Presumably the handpumps are going to a borehole.
Anjil Adhikari: Yes.
Md. Abdul Alim: I would like to raise a couple of issues relating to pricing of the water supply, as you mentioned. Bangladesh is a flood-prone country. Most of the land is a flood plain. Every year it faces different kinds of disasters, most prominently floods. In the previous flood, around 75% of the land became flooded.
Due to the phenomenon of climate change, in alternating years we are facing devastating floods. These floods mostly impact the WASH sector. The WASH facilities become flooded, damaged and contaminated due to pollution.
Rural people are always struggling with climate change impacts and the changing environment caused by climate change and other factors. There is a huge lack of adequate health, nutrition and education for the children, due to the lack of earning. In that case, how can they spend money buying water? The situation becomes, “Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink”. That is the problem for our country.
Water is everywhere. They were used to getting water from natural sources or hand tubewells, but now they need to spend extra money to repair their infrastructures while almost every year those are being destroyed by natural hazards.
In the coastal zones of our country, due to the sea level rise, salinity contamination is increasing day by day. That is destroying the infrastructure. The health condition of women is going down, as they are using saline water for bathing and washing. That is why the miscarriage rate of pregnant woman is increasing day by day.
Tim mentioned industrialisation. The garment sector in Bangladesh is very broad. It has a huge impact on the water quality around major cities where the garment industry is based. All of the surrounding water bodies are really polluted. The environment in Bangladesh is worsening, along with the quality of water.
Altogether, paying for water for drinking and for household use is really unrealistic in the context of Bangladesh and, I believe, other countries as well. A proper water share in terms of quality and quantity should be considered. I believe the UK Government can take a lead on that to ensure a proper share of good-quality water.
Q12 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Nick, I would like to know how the UK prioritises WASH. Where do we sit compared to other donor countries? According to some figures we have, in 2017 we gave £177 million. In 2021, which is the last year we have figures for, we gave £78 million. Where do we sit in the grand scheme of things?0
Dr Hepworth: Historically, the UK has been a really important donor and leader on WASH. That has fallen away, sadly, through the cuts. Based on our analysis of the OECD figures, all sectors lost a third of aid between 2019 and 2021. Over the same period, WASH and water resource management lost two-thirds. That just does not make sense when you look at the importance of WASH across the priorities set out in the international development strategy. It does not add up. The biggest drop was in WASH and water management, to £79 million, as you say. Water resource management and flood preparedness were already really low. They have been cut to almost nothing.
Disaster risk reduction has been cut by 80%, from £10 million to £2 million. That is just irresponsible when all scenarios for the impact of climate change predict a greater frequency and severity of floods and droughts. For aid to Africa in particular, the spending on water has gone down two-thirds from £180 million to £60 million over that same period.
The scale and the speed of the cuts have been shocking to those working in the sector. I can speak from experience. We had a programme of £1.3 million to support accountability monitoring for water to help women and girls hold Governments to account for better services and sanitation. That was cut, which meant we could not reach the million people we were going to reach in Tanzania.
Q13 Chair: What notice did you have of that cut?
Dr Hepworth: We were promised that the programme would not be cut through Covid. It was due to start. It was about two weeks before the programme was due to start.
Chris Law: That is dreadful.
Chair: You had employed people.
Dr Hepworth: Sure, yes. The way funding works is that you get matched funding. That matched funding was also lost. There was a huge impact. It demolished those kinds of programmes.
Q14 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I just continue that conversation? Where do we fit with the other big first-world countries such as France and Germany?
Dr Hepworth: I do not have that analysis. We can do some more work and share it with you after the meeting.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: The Government need to wake up to this. It would be interesting to know where we sit in the scheme of things.
Tim Wainwright: First of all, on the UK, the points on aid have been made well. I would invite you to reflect on the wider picture over the last 10 years around how much effort the UK has put into this whole sector. Here are a few thoughts.
When I talked with you, Sarah, I was pointing out that the last time this Committee did a full inquiry into WASH was in 2006, so 17 years ago. In the last 10 years, you have done seven inquiries into health, two into education and none into water.
Chair: WASH was included in most of those.
Tim Wainwright: I am sure. If we look at the major policymaking speeches made by Government Ministers over the last six years, there have been three on health, six on education and none on water. I do not know the number of staff. It would be interesting to ask how many staff are devoted to these three areas.
You have heard the numbers on water aid. These are the comparable figures at the moment: around £550 million is going into health, £360 million is going into education and we are down to £70 million in water from £200 million. If you ask the UK public or MPs what the top three areas of investment for aid should be, more than 50% will include water, sanitation and hygiene. In fact, they think that is already how a lot of aid is spent.
The reason I am comparing to health and education is that, personally, I see these as three fundamental public services. I would challenge the whole positioning of this issue. It is just in the wrong place. There is a systemic problem with the way it is positioned as an afterthought that gets included in things. The mistake people make is to assume it is there. It is not there. It is at risk. It is at further risk.
You asked how we compare against other countries. Overall, it is quite normal to not put very much emphasis on water. You are not alone. We could submit the actual numbers afterwards in terms of the size of aid programmes. If you look at USAID, it has been consistently pretty strong on these issues. Japan has been strong. Germany is strong on what is sometimes referred to as big water. WASH is at the human end of water, but Germany has invested a lot in river quality.
Dr Hepworth: That has also been cut.
Tim Wainwright: Yes. As a follow-up, we could give you a bit more of a global analysis of where the UK sits. There is a global problem, but I would like to talk about the opportunity side of this. I do not want to be too gloomy. I would like to—
Chair: Yes, but not right now.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I pass that same question over to Anjil? What is your view on this?
Anjil Adhikari: I cannot respond to you on where the UK stands globally. I am not sure about the UK’s position in terms of the global funding of WASH, but I can talk about Nepal. It is a very important contributor in the WASH sector. I recall working in one of the funding programmes—a post-earthquake reconstruction project in Nepal. With Oxfam and FCDO, we did work to build around 150 water supply systems reaching 58,000 people. That was a significant number, which really moved the needle on SDG 6.1 by contributing to more people having access to drinking water.
Q15 Chair: Of the programmes you are doing, where is the money coming from?
Anjil Adhikari: For the programme I mentioned in Nepal it was from FCDO. It ended in 2021.
Q16 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Nick, there is another thing I wanted to talk to you about. Rather interestingly, when you were talking earlier, you said that the British Government had some responsibility for the cholera outbreak in Malawi, which has killed more than 700 people, as a result of cuts in aid for water, sanitation and hygiene.
I am not questioning the figures. I am interested in where else you think the British Government have failed to reach out to a situation where we may have contributed to people losing their lives or certainly their livelihoods. Are there other examples you have?
Dr Hepworth: Can I look at the Malawi example first?
Mr Liddell-Grainger: Yes, of course, please.
Dr Hepworth: It is a particularly important example, and the Committee needs to understand it well. Some of those figures are potentially contested by FCDO, but it is important that we get the facts straight.
Malawi is in the grip of its deadliest cholera epidemic ever. There have been 40,000 cases. It is in every district. There are now close to 1,500 people dead, 20% of those being kids. The epidemic started due to Storm Ana in January 2022, which devastated Malawi. The Shire basin was totally flooded out. They had 3 metres of rain in a day.[1] Those are the perfect conditions for cholera: smashed up infrastructure, contaminated flood water and displaced people moving to displacement camps, 200,000 of them.
The most badly affected places were Mangochi, Balaka, Phalombe and Chikwawa. I visited Chikwawa just after the floods and saw that devastation. I met families who had lost kids because they had fallen out of trees, where they were sheltering at night, into the floodwater. There has been a really devastating impact.
Malawi is vulnerable to cholera. The WASH context is there. Only a quarter of Malawians have a decent toilet and 10% have access to hand washing. The Malawi Government can fund only 5% of their water security needs. They are heavily dependent on donors. The UK traditionally, historically, has been a really important donor in Malawi, but it has cut its aid on WASH by 50% since 2018. That is the backdrop. That means fewer spares, fewer technicians, less monitoring of those water systems when that flood and the cholera hit.
There was also a programme called BRACC—Building Resilience and Adapting to Climate Change—which was focused in those same districts where the flooding and cholera started. It was specifically focused on building the resilience of communities to extreme weather events like that flood and helping communities do contingency planning in the event of emergencies like that.
There was also something called a crisis modifier, which is a brilliant idea. It is a big pot of money to deploy to stop bad situations getting much worse. The cuts meant that was not deployed. The FCDO has contested that and said it did deploy it. That was in a different part of the country in response to a lean season event.
I have the design documents for the programme, which say it could be triggered in the event of a flood. If it had been, we could have seen support for displaced communities, provision of WASH and treatment for people who got cholera in those places more rapidly. We could have potentially helped control or avoid the cholera epidemic we have seen. We stand by that. If FCDO is seriously contesting it, let us have an independent review of the problem and do a lesson-learning exercise. That is a really useful example of what happens when a country like the UK pulls out important aid to the most vulnerable communities on the planet. You get cholera epidemics. You get people dying when they should not.
Q17 Chris Law: What I have heard in the last 15 minutes is astonishing: just how far it has fallen off the radar and how important WASH is. My understanding is that in international development terms WASH is the most cost-effective way of improving people’s lives.
This is a general question, because I am really horrified. Why has it fallen so far off, not just in the UK but elsewhere? What do we need to do, as parliamentarians, to get it right back up there and be noticed? The UK led on this in the past.
My second question is more specific. What has been the impact of the UK cuts on women and girls, in your experience? Anjil, if you could go first, that would be great.
Anjil Adhikari: I will start with the impact of funding cuts on women and girls. When we talk about WASH and women and girls, we often look at the time saved by bringing the water closer to your home and linking it with more productive time. From one of our engagements, we have seen that it is not just about productivity and time; it is about mental health.
Bringing water closer to home means women can have two or three more hours to sleep in the early morning. I can at least speak for our hilly areas, where women have to wake up at 3 am to collect water and come back. They expressed the anxiety that they go through in the two-hour journey from home to the source and back, remembering the pile of work they have to come back and do. Having water brought to their home gives them that peace, because they can sleep for at least two more hours.
I was really personally touched when many women in this hilly area said they were happy with the water supply system coming to their home because they can sleep. I had never looked at our work on water in that way.
In terms of education, when we bring safely managed water and sanitation closer to the home, it is deeply connected with the security, privacy and dignity of women and girls. With the funding cuts, we are unable to reach this population.
At least for Nepal, we are stuck at 90% having basic access to drinking water, out of which around 50% use a pipe system. The rest are still dependent on deep wells or safely managed sources. In this scenario, the funding cuts mean we will still not be able to reach those in the last mile, who will still struggle to get this basic human right.
Dr Hepworth: This is a really good question, one that we ask ourselves. How can we get water up the ladder of political priority? That is what has happened. It competes with lots of other issues.
You do not win lots of votes by pointing to a well‑managed aquifer, but pointing to an airport, a school or a new motorway can be a vote-winner. Water struggles to get the political priority it deserves. We need to work together to change that, because that means it does not get the investment it needs. It is chronic underinvestment that gets us where we are today.
We have to work to get that political priority for water, not just in the UK but globally. We have to legislate for the changes we need and to get system changes so that corporates are reporting their performance on water as a mandatory requirement and banks are screening for good and bad water investments as part of their standard practice. Strategic investment is needed to strengthen the systems for better water governance.
We do not want the UK to build everybody’s taps, toilets and reservoirs. We want it to deploy the expertise to build systems and institutions that can make sure those things happen in sustainable ways. It will serve the UK interest, I am sure.
It is really a case of making sure the UK Government prioritise water across Government, and FCDO ramps up its investment and prioritisation of WASH, water resource management and disaster reduction, and holding them to account for that. It is easy to make promises at places like COP, but we need to see that followed up with reform and investment to make things happen.
Q18 Chris Law: Nick, at the beginning you mentioned self-financing models. The people who are watching this will want to know what that means. I want to know what that means.
In Scotland, our water is a public resource. It is owned by the state. In the UK, as we know, it is the opposite. When you are in some of the most vulnerable communities and countries, does that picture differ from country to country? Are they largely publicly owned?
Dr Hepworth: In most countries around the world—this is water resource management—water is vested in the state. If you want to use it, you have to get a permit and a licence, and pay for that use. Sometimes that is based on how much water you use. Payment for taps and toilets is slightly different. In some places it is privatised; sometimes it is publicly owned or community-managed.
Managing abstraction and withdrawal of water from aquifers and rivers is through engagement with something like SEPA. Most countries have authorities that administer the use of water resources. If they charge a proper rate, not for profit but to reinvest in the system, that can self‑finance monitoring, early warning systems and infrastructure. That is how water management works.
It receives some subsidy from central Government, but charging a proper rate for bulk and volumetric water use puts revenue back into the system for water management. It also sends the right signals to water users to conserve water, to protect it and to use it wisely.
Q19 Chris Law: Why is that not happening? Something else you shocked us with today was about how 71% of the products we have and use in this country are the product of water resources elsewhere. Very often you have large companies and multinationals not paying anything. Why is that? Why are they getting away with it?
Dr Hepworth: If I am candid, it is about power. The people who suffer from water problems are poor and often struggle to have their voices heard. The people who benefit from the status quo do well from the status quo. One of the reasons we do not see change is the political economy we see in lots of these countries. That can be changed through stronger accountability.
From our global evidence review of accountability interventions in the water sector, we see that 80% of interventions lead to better outcomes for poor people. It is a really good value-for-money investment. This is about getting people to provide oversight of what is really going on in water, who is getting what water, how much they are paying and who is causing pollution. This is a really useful intervention that the UK could be supporting.
Chair: Could I ask Abdul to come in specifically on the bit about women and girls?
Md. Abdul Alim: I would like to include some examples from the Rohingya community here in Bangladesh. There is a huge camp here, in which around 1 million Rohingya people reside. With support from different donors and different countries, these people are receiving WASH facilities and services.
Over the recent period, in 2019, 2020 and 2021, there were funding gaps of 25%, 35% and 28% in the WASH sector. In 2022, there was a 50% funding gap in the WASH sector, as we are coming out of the Covid pandemic.
Clearly, I can link that with the funding cuts from the developed countries on the Rohingya crisis issues. In particular, I can share with you that 22% of the water infrastructure in the camps severely needs care and maintenance support, which is being deprioritised due to the funding gap and funding cuts. That is going to impact directly on the women and girls in the camps. This is a disadvantaged community and, for religious reasons, they do not allow women and girls to go out for water collection.
This camp is very densely populated. There is only 15 square metres of space per person there. It is very difficult for women and girls to access the water and hygiene options in the camp. There is not much privacy for them. There is not enough lighting at night. There are also other phenomena that restrict them from collecting water or using the facilities at the time they want to. It has a clear impact on women and girls, their mental health and their menstrual hygiene and health. It has a direct impact on the health sector overall as well.
If the funding for the WASH sector is not adequate, that is going to increase the funding requirement for other sectors as well. That will affect health, livelihoods, educations and everything else. Children drop out due to the health-related issues that are water-borne. That is gradually becoming prominent as well.
I would say that investment in WASH is an investment in women, who are mostly impacted by the WASH-related crisis, and an investment in other sectors and in development overall.
Q20 Chair: Abdul, we are seeing too many humanitarian crises around the world. Do you see WASH as a priority from the donor perspective in the response to each of those?
Md. Abdul Alim: Whenever I have experienced a disaster or a crisis in my life, if it is related to a natural disaster, the WASH sector is always what is primarily damaged. The infrastructure of WASH in our country is not very sustainable.
It gets inundated. It gets washed out by the flood, the cyclone or anything. In the refugee crisis and the camp context, over the period millions of people have come into Bangladesh. There was no health facility. It was forest land. It was a very devastating situation. We came to know that women were not taking cooked food because they could not use the toilet. They have too much pain so how could they have more food?
Our Prime Minister declared that within seven days we want to ensure 100% sanitation facilities for the Rohingya people. That is how the initial months and years went. Now the situation has improved further, but it is still there.
Yes, the WASH sector is the most prominent one. We should also consider the WASH sector from the perspective of protection, particularly the protection of women and girls. They are the main actors in the family and in society who collect the water. Women have specific needs for their menstrual hygiene management. Water and sanitation is very important for them.
I have experience in the Jamalpur area of Bangladesh. I saw that women are used to going for menstrual hygiene management at night because they cannot go far to collect water. There is no way that can save them from the health hazard, apart from that.
Even in the humanitarian response, as you see, the needs of women are not always considered in the way they should be. WASH packages do not always consider menstrual hygiene kits for women and girls who have lost everything due to the cyclone or the flood. One part of WASH is to consider this from women’s perspective. At ActionAid, we try to see the WASH sector mostly from the perspective of how we can protect women and adolescent girls in that additional dimension for their own purposes.
Q21 Mr Sharma: Nick and then Anjil, how can the FCDO partner work with national Governments and the private sector to increase access to WASH?
Dr Hepworth: The private sector is going to play a really important role in dealing with the water crisis, particularly companies that use a lot of water. I am not talking about water utilities. I am talking about some of the big water users out there, such as Cargill, Nestlé, Associated British Foods or Coca-Cola.
The companies that provide us with our food and daily needs account for a huge amount of the world’s water use. They also employ, in globalised supply chains, about one in five of the world’s population. They also often work in the places that face the most difficult water and climate challenges and WASH underprovision.
They are going to be really important allies. They are also very powerful. They can influence finance and they have political influence. As allies, they are going to be really important. We have lots of examples where water being used irresponsibly can cause chaos for nature, communities and the economy.
At Water Witness, we have been working on smarter ways of working with the private sector for the past 10 years. For example, we have co-developed the international water standard, which guides and recognises responsible water use by corporations. It is now used by Apple, Unilever and many others. Within that, there is a focus on addressing local problems in appropriate ways, including on WASH.
There are mechanisms out there. The problem is that the standard is still too niche. It is used by only a handful of companies out there. We need to make water stewardship a global business norm so that it goes without saying that all the workers in your supply chains will have decent access to WASH, that all the women who work in your factories will have menstrual hygiene management and that you will take action on communities where there is underprovision near and around your supply chains.
There is a lot happening in this space, and we are working with the finance sector to try to send signals from all directions to companies to get this water management piece right. I come back to the Declaration for Fair Water Footprints, which, through the UK’s leadership, has 26 signatories, including WaterAid. That declaration sets the vision for getting this right in the future, so that, by 2030, there is universal WASH in and around our globalised supply chains.
There is a lot that can be done. What FCDO can do is to back up those commitments with the money and leadership that is needed. There are two staff working on this at the moment in FCDO. That is simply not enough. There needs to be more person power and more finance. Without that, it is not going to happen.
Anjil Adhikari: The role of FCDO should be more in financing the water management rollout to start with. In the context of Nepal, we provided access to a basic water supply for 90% of the population, but our report says that around 75% of the water supply systems built in rural areas become dysfunctional one or two years after construction.
The main reason for this has been found to be the management model. Currently, these systems are being managed by water user committees. Water user committees are representatives of communities who are trained for a few days and then expected to manage these technical water supply systems.
Oxfam is currently working with the local Government as well as the Ministry of Water Supply to build a management model where the water supply system could come under an umbrella. Currently, it is scattered and managed by different user committees.
The problem we see in terms of managing the water supply system is our funding gap. In the context of Nepal, around $1.5 billion is required to reach the SGD on safely managed drinking water. In this context, how are we planning to work? To make the system sustainable, there should be some investment from the local government. Some money comes from the tariff, but there is always a funding gap around the operation and maintenance costs to keep these water supply systems running.
This is where the funding and development aid from the FCDO could be crucial, until these business models for managing water supply systems reach the stage that the private sector can chip in because it sees that the investment is more secure. This aid could support the management model for the first two or three years and make the water supply system sustainable. From the third or fourth year, the private sector could chip in with investments. Gradually, the aid could exit and we could increase local investment, the tariff and financing from the private sector to make it self-sufficient after a few years of investment.
Md. Abdul Alim: The discussion is about whether the private sector can play a vital role in solving the problem, but I have a different opinion. Water is a very basic right of the community. At least for a country like Bangladesh, our proposition would be that water management and the resolution of these water issues should be participatory and locally led.
Since the women’s and girls’ issues are very prominent and very much linked to the water issues, the UK Government should consider their participation in the decision-making related to water and the management of water sources in future planning and funding. Their meaningful participation in different discussions at a global level should be financed by the UK Government. That could be considered.
Local innovation and solutions should be considered. In a country like Bangladesh, there is huge indigenous knowledge related to this. We need financing to promote that. To make it more sustainable, some technical support might be required.
The people in Bangladesh can never think of paying for water. It is unbelievable for people because there is water everywhere. However, it is about the quality and about sharing that high-quality water. I would request the UK Government and Parliament to keep that in consideration. The people in the rural areas of a third‑world country like Bangladesh, where most people are living, are not in a position to buy water. They do not have that capacity.
Chair: Thank you, Abdul. That point was made by Anjil as well about Nepal, so it is an issue we need to consider. Gentlemen, I am going to start asking you for shorter answers, please.
Q22 Mr Sharma: You can add further to your previous answer, Abdul. What contribution does access to WASH make to development outcomes for women and girls?
Md. Abdul Alim: If I understand your question properly, we need to invest in the WASH sector to create more permanent and durable infrastructure. For example, the support we provide in humanitarian crises and development interventions is not sustainable, considering the type of natural hazards we have, due to the cyclones, the floods and other things. The development goes a bit better, and then there is a disaster. Everything is destroyed again and we are starting from ground zero.
Last year Bangladesh faced a record-breaking flood in the north-east of the country. Bangladesh had not faced the like in 120 years. Due to that flood, the WASH infrastructure was destroyed. A Government Department predicted that the Bangladesh Government would need five years of rehabilitation work, so the Government and its development partners initiated that. To sustain the development of the sector, we need to think about more permanent and durable solutions for WASH.
Anjil Adhikari: I agree with what Abdul said.
Q23 Mr Sharma: Abdul, has the FCDO sufficiently focused in its WASH programmes on including women and girls? Has WASH been sufficiently integrated into its work on sexual and reproductive health?
Md. Abdul Alim: Thank you. I can give you my opinion from the Bangladeshi experience. The overall WASH sector in Bangladesh has been hugely supported by the FCDO in the last decade. The FCDO made a huge contribution and the Government recognised that.
If I consider the recent years, maybe I do not have the proper information, but I do not see that kind of financing in the WASH sector from the FCDO. There is some for the immediate humanitarian response, but not the recovery phase. We need to look into that.
Apart from that, there is funding on sexual and reproductive health, especially targeting young and adolescent girls, but the overall funding commitment is reducing. As we know, around 50% of FCDO ODA to Bangladesh has been cut. That has an overall impact on this sector. These funds need to be increased for Bangladesh and the people in our rural areas.
Q24 Mr Sharma: Can you briefly answer my next question? How is infant health and mortality affected by a lack of access to WASH?
Md. Abdul Alim: It is very much linked to their health, due to a lack of quality water and good sanitation practice. In a camp context, people’s food and belongings become contaminated. It has a huge impact. During the dry season, there is much less rain, so water use in the WASH facilities is much lower. There is more contamination in that area and diseases spread very quickly.
There is a direct linkage with child health. It increases their mortality. During Covid and before that, we also experienced something like that in our country and in the Rohingya camps.
Apart from that, school drop-out is also an issue due to this epidemic problem when children get sick. It also increases the expenditure of the family so the school drop-out rate is always increasing. Whenever additional expenditure for the family is required, that directly impacts on children and their education. That increases child marriage and affects all other aspects, including their health.
Tim Wainwright: A baby dies every minute—
Q25 Kate Osamor: I have a question for you, Tim. It goes without saying that access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene is essential to stopping the spread of disease. Given how important WASH has been in tackling Covid‑19, in your opinion, does the international community attach sufficient priority to WASH in tackling global diseases?
Tim Wainwright: I am sorry. I was just wanting to come in on that, which is answering the same point.
Chair: Trust the process, Tim.
Tim Wainwright: Every minute a baby dies for reasons that could be avoided if WASH were provided. I have visited health centres, as I said earlier. Two thirds of health centres do not have running water and women are traveling long distances to deliver babies and have caesarean sections in environments where the clinicians are 300 metres’ walk away from somewhere where they can wash their hands.
My answer to your question is yes. The lack of access to water, sanitation and hygiene risks the investments you are making in health, education and gender equity. That is why I was arguing earlier that you need to think about all three. You need to think about health, education and water, and put them on the same level.
There is a structural issue, which is not present just in the UK Government, where this is seen as something that is taken for granted. It is a dangerous situation.
Q26 Kate Osamor: In your opinion, is there sufficient priority put on WASH?
Tim Wainwright: No, not nearly enough. I would have said the same prior to the aid cuts. The aid cuts have made it a lot worse because it is a two-thirds cut. I would have said the same already. I did say the same already.
Q27 Kate Osamor: I have a question for Abdul and Anjil now. Can you just tell us a little bit more about how natural disasters affect access to WASH, especially following the floods in Pakistan? We have seen the tragedy that has happened in Turkey and Syria. You could tag on to that the experience of what happened in Pakistan and what lessons can be learned for aid and rescue when it comes to Turkey and Syria.
Md. Abdul Alim: In the past, we have seen that, when water sources are damaged by a disaster, the women and children who collect the water usually need to go far away to find a safer water source. That increases the risk of violence and abuse for children, women and adolescent girls.
In most societies in the world, as we know, women and children are always responsible for collecting the water. When it comes to menstrual hygiene management, women on our continent are used to going to sanitation facilities. When these WASH facilities are not available, when they are homeless or temporarily displaced due to the flood, it is a disaster for menstrual hygiene management. That has a huge health impact on them, which they then bear throughout their lives.
That is why it is very risky for children and women, especially adolescent girls, from a protection and a gender-based violence perspective.
Q28 Kate Osamor: Abdul, how does ActionAid respond to such a natural disaster? How would you quickly restore WASH facilities?
Md. Abdul Alim: I am happy to say that ActionAid’s response mainly targets women, adolescent girls and children when it comes to our WASH-related interventions from a protection perspective. In terms of how we respond, in the emergency phase, the life-saving phase, we try to provide drinkable water in bottles or any other form, depending on the context and the available sources of water. We are used to trucking water from safer sources to affected communities and then distributing it.
Apart from that immediate rehabilitation work, we start by re-establishing and disinfecting water sources. It depends. Reconstruction or repair work might be needed for some water points and sanitation facilities. If something needs rebuilding, we will rebuild it immediately. We also do a needs assessment of what kind of interventions are required, and then we will start, as soon as possible, to repair and maintain those places.
Considering that assessment, we try to start with the points that can cover the largest community and then get ready to cover other communities. In this case, we usually bring women into the leadership so that they can have a voice and their needs are considered during the response.
Kate Osamor: Anjil, would you like to add anything to that?
Anjil Adhikari: Yes. I agree with what Abdul said. In the context of Nepal, we have a few geographical challenges. In our country, we have people living from sea level to almost 5,000 meters above sea level. We have hills. We have the Himalayas, and people are living there.
When there is a disaster, let us say an earthquake, the problem is not just about the dismantling of the WASH infrastructure. Sometimes it diminishes the sources of water because there has been a fracture in the earth somewhere and the water source has diminished. That creates a big challenge if the entire community has to be migrated to a different area.
Disasters have a big impact on this infrastructure. When we are building these rural water supply systems, we do not have enough funds to assess the quality of land, the steepness of the slope, or whether it would be enough to sustain this infrastructure, because funds in rural sectors are limited.
Flatlands in areas where it is almost at sea level or 60 metres to 70 metres from sea level are highly impacted by flooding. They are different disasters. With all these impacts, people have to migrate to a place where they depend on unsafe sources, and that impacts the health of mothers, children and everyone.
In terms of what Oxfam does in this situation, we have a certain amount of internal funds that we quickly mobilise in a disaster for a quick fix wherever possible. That is when we also have a team to raise funds so that we make sure that the broken system is quickly fixed and people come back to normal life as soon as possible.
Q29 Theo Clarke: Can I just pick up, Tim, on your point about disasters in lower-income countries. How effectively have the UK Government responded?
Tim Wainwright: WaterAid is predominantly a long-term development agency and, therefore, I am wondering if ActionAid or Oxfam might be better placed to respond to that question.
Md Abdul Alim: I just want to raise one issue here. Apart from the humanitarian interventions related to it, WASH is a very vital issue. It is very important, with a response required from the very first hours after the disasters. Being a humanitarian, I realise that our approach should be reaching the community with support as early as possible. That should be our motto.
The challenge that we face during the response is that, nowadays and in the last five to 10 years, the allocation from donors—not only FCDO but all donors—comes a bit late. It takes time to decide the allocation. As Anjil says, we start with our contingency funding, but we always depend on donor funding to start a huge operation. That is one thing that we need to consider.
At the same time, I would like to appreciate the FCDO initiative to put funds in the Start Fund pot as well. This really helps us in Bangladesh especially to respond very quickly, because the Start Fund mandate is to reach the community in as short a time as possible. FCDO is providing funds there, which we are accessing directly, by the way, not from the FCDO but through the Start Fund. That is helping quite interestingly in the country, and the Start Fund is the first responder from any donor fund until now. That is the only concern. Allocation is an issue, but quick allocation and a quick decision are very important for humanitarian response.
Q30 Theo Clarke: If I could turn to a different topic, I am interested to know what the impact is of climate change on access to WASH in lower-income countries. Tim, do you want to comment on that first?
Tim Wainwright: Climate change affects human beings principally through water, either too much or too little, so water is the central issue in adapting to climate change. A lot of the world’s attention at the moment is on mitigation and slowing down climate change, and that is very important, but, in my view, equal attention needs to be paid to adapting to climate change.
In every country in which WaterAid works, you can see the impact of climate change. I will give a couple of examples, but it is widespread. It is also worth noting that the countries I am talking about are the parts of the world that did the least to cause climate change.
Briefly, because it has already been mentioned by others who probably know more about this than I do, rising sea levels in Bangladesh are salinating water sources, and very large populations could be affected by this. It is also a breeding ground for cholera. Cholera microbes thrive in salt water. Look at Nigeria, which is facing floods, droughts and rising sea levels, from a situation where it has a very widespread lack of access to drinking water, poor sanitation and poor hygiene already.
I would see it as a big multiplier of risk. Everything that we have just been discussing for this entire session could get an awful lot more serious. On the other side, and perhaps looking more at opportunity, a community that has resilient access to water, sanitation and hygiene has more of a fighting chance to adapt to climate change in all its different manifestations.
If you think particularly about access to water, we did a piece of work and announced it on World Water Day last year with the British Geological Survey, looking at groundwater supplies. In south Asia, which we have heard a lot about, there are very big risks to groundwater supplies. If you get changes in weather patterns, where you get 10 storms instead of one, the replenishment of groundwater is reduced. You are already in an environment where groundwater is being over-extracted, which is the case across lots of south Asia. You are in a very difficult situation and you start to get not only lack of access to water but also quality issues, as mentioned earlier, for instance arsenic. When the water table drops, the poisons get more concentrated.
There is a bit of hope if you look at Africa. Almost every country in Africa is sitting on enough water to survive a five-year drought. Quite a lot of countries are sitting on 20 years’ supply, but they have no means of accessing it. You need to be careful that Africa does not make the same mistakes that have been made in south Asia in terms of overuse, but there are some opportunities.
It links back to the point that I was making earlier about quite major investment being needed. The reason that I was trying to come in earlier, Virendra, on your private sector question is that you have focused on the private sector as users of water and as providers of water utilities, but the other area is the private sector as an investor in water. Aid could play a role in leveraging private sector investment and making sure that it is done in a pro-poor way. Particularly in the area of climate adaptation, there is an opportunity.
Q31 Theo Clarke: Abdul, could I come back to you on the same point, but also ask how you predict that climate change will affect access to WASH in, say, 2030?
Md Abdul Alim: In Bangladesh, there are different ecosystems, as Tim mentioned. The southern, coastal part has a sea-level rise and a cyclone impact on WASH facilities. The water crisis in the southern belt has become very prominent, especially for drinking water as well as for household water use and water for sanitation. All the ponds and rivers that were freshwater before are becoming saline. Even drain water is becoming saline due to sea level rise.
Apart from that, there is irregular rainfall. For two to three weeks during the monsoon, there is no rain. There used to be regular rain, but there is none for three or four weeks. Within a couple of days, there are huge rains that cannot be absorbed by the ecosystem, which becomes a flood.
Even in the monsoon season, when there was adequate water, nowadays it is becoming a big problem. Within the monsoon, there is drought and, again, there are floods. These are all climate change phenomena that are creating problems. When there is less water, the WASH sector is impacted, especially sanitation and other things, in drought-prone parts of the country. At the same time, during floods, when sanitation facilities are not there people use open water so the water becomes altogether contaminated. It is very risky to use this water for any household purpose.
Anjil Adhikari: In south Asia, river flows are expected to reduce by up to 20% by 2100. It seems pretty far away, but the number of people who are dependent upon these rivers for access to safe drinking water, sewerage and flushing lavatories, so overall hygiene and health, are going to be impacted. We have already seen low levels of conflict between communities in the hilly region of Nepal, where water sources in upper regions are depleting and people are migrating closer to rivers. People are looking for alternate sources, and communities who are already dependent on these sources are now in conflict with the remaining communities. We are starting to see mild conflicts and we fear that this might have a bigger impact in the future. With Nepal being placed in between India and China, and the possibility of water stress in the future, it could be a major geopolitical issue in terms of water availability and water safety. These are not just impacting local life, but are also going to impact the political dimension in the future.
Apart from that, excess rainfall in flatlands is going to cause floods and impact the deep wells, which is, again, going to impact the health of infants, women and boys. It is very critical. The sad part is that there is a very low contribution by Nepal to climate change impact, but the impact that we and our communities are receiving is very high.
Q32 Mr Sharma: Tim, what assessment have you made of the correlation between a lack of access to WASH and conflict?
Tim Wainwright: I would suggest you redirect the question, because we do not have a great deal of experience in that area, although I would just quickly refer you back to the point I made about the US redefinition of access to water as an indicator of national security. It does have a big impact on national security, particularly if it reaches a lot of people.
Anjil Adhikari: We have not done a very technical assessment of the linkage between conflict and WASH services, but we have seen some practical examples, like how not having these WASH services in place increases conflict. Let me give you the example of a heritage pond in one of our landscapes. People used to depend on this pond for a long period of time, but, with the change in climatic patterns and increased sediment flow in these ponds, the water quality is depleting.
People are now switching to another water source, which there is already less of, and communities from other areas are protesting that they should not have access to that water, because that would mean that they had less water for sanitation and hygiene. As Abdul has frequently mentioned, less water means less use for menstrual hygiene or for children, and that is going to impact health in the longer term.
Q33 Mr Bacon: Abdul, I would like to ask you about refugees and host countries. We on this Committee saw in Jordan that the presence of refugees in large numbers places extra pressure on water resources and can lead to serious water shortages in host countries. How do you minimise the negative impact of that?
Md Abdul Alim: I was also thinking of sharing that information. As you know, Rohingya people are staying in our country, in moderately hilly areas. The scarcity of groundwater and access to groundwater was a problem for the local community for a long time, because the water table is not available everywhere in these areas. When these Rohingya people came to a couple of sub-districts and became a larger community than the local communities, around 1,200 boreholes had to be initiated to supply water to them. As a result, for the last three years, we have started to experience that, every year, this water table is gradually going down in the dry season. That is impacting not only the Rohingya people but also the host community.
Mr Bacon: Yes, that is my question. What I want to know is how you mitigate it.
Md Abdul Alim: It is not yet mitigated, but the way that development agencies and humanitarian organisations are trying to solve the problem is by coming up with alternatives around how we can preserve rainwater for use in the dry season, and providing the host community with additional technological or financial support to further increase the depth of the borehole, so that they can start planning from there and trying to recycle some of the waste water, so that that can be supplied to both the host community and the Rohingya community.
There are not yet any direct solutions, but treating this surface water and distributing it through the pipe services and other things, and other piecemeal solutions, are being tried. There are two subdistricts in this area where there are Rohingya refugees. Each has a different dimension in terms of the water, so the solutions are also different.
The straight response to your question is that the work is going on, but there is no direct solution yet. Supporting both communities is one way to resolve the crisis, with humanitarian people beside the Rohingya people.
Q34 Mr Bacon: I would like to ask you a different question, moving away from refugees. You mentioned earlier that people find it unbelievable that they might have to pay for water. Mr Wainwright referred earlier to the need to create systems that are sustainable. You die without water in three days. Is food free for everybody in Bangladesh? Do people pay for food in Bangladesh?
Md Abdul Alim: Most people grow their food.
Mr Bacon: Yes, they are smallholders.
Md Abdul Alim: Not everybody, but they buy food.
Q35 Mr Bacon: So they are used to paying money for food, but you say they are not used to paying money for water. Where do you think the money is going to come from to create better systems that will last longer, that are more sustainable and that help solve the problem? Do you think it will come permanently from foreign donations, or does there need to be something else that is more long term and, if so, what is that?
Md Abdul Alim: Let me relate it from our perspective. The traditional practice of the community depended on nature. At that time, all the sources were better. Now that system is destroyed. If we want to link that, that has a relation to why development assistance is required for this country. For example, one area of impact is all the big industries related to the garment sector. Lots of water sources are being destroyed and contaminated through that system. Who will pay for that? Developed countries are ensuring that factories that perform well receive R&D materials, whether or not they are maintaining the environment properly. That is one area to think of.
If I look at it from the climate change perspective, Bangladesh is not liable for climate change. It is not that Bangladesh is making those kinds of emissions. As my colleague from Nepal mentioned, they are the receivers of climate change impacts. How do we adapt? We need to adapt to the situation. Frequent disasters are destroying our systems. We need better sustainable options in the climate change context as well.
We are not liable for climate change, so who is going to support that? If you consider it from that perspective, I would say that the countries that are responsible for climate change are those that should compensate for the loss and damage being faced by southern countries.
Q36 Chris Law: Abdul, just to follow on from that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the situation in refugee camps. I had the privilege to visit the Rohingya in 2018 in Cox’s Bazar in the south. I wanted to ask what challenges and risks women and girls face in those refugee camps. How has access to WASH affected the spread of Covid-19 in those camps?
Md Abdul Alim: Sorry, but I could not understand the first part of your question. Can you repeat it, please?
Chris Law: I wanted to know what the impact is of the WASH facilities, or lack of WASH facilities, for example, in refugee camps. In particular, I want to ask about Cox’s Bazar and the 1 million Rohingya refugees. It is somewhere I have personally visited. Subsequently, we learned during Covid about how it had been fenced off by Bangladeshi authorities. What has been the impact on the WASH facilities and how did Covid either get prevented or spread as a result of the access to those facilities?
Md Abdul Alim: We were afraid about the Covid impact in the Rohingya camps, but it was not like that, because it was well managed by the humanitarian actors and all the leaders of our Government. The fencing that you mentioned was not an issue, because adequate WASH facilities are inside the camp. The problem is maintaining that.
The second thing is behavioural change. During the Covid pandemic, all the humanitarian actors installed lots of WASH facilities for handwashing and maintaining other hygiene practices. There was a lot of awareness-raising activity, distributing masks and practising distance during the distribution of assistance and in any awareness sessions. There was a huge effort by all actors.
Even during the pandemic period, the activities and interventions in the Rohingya camps were reconsidered, and only lifesaving activities were permitted in that particular time. That was very useful. The water sector was one of the priority sectors in that time to ensure the quality of water and the maintenance of water sources and WASH facilities. That is how it was well managed. The contamination of Covid-19 inside the Rohingya camp was less than in the host community outside the Rohingya camp.
Q37 Chris Law: Tim, WaterAid is in a number of refugee camps around the world. What are the consequences to all those in the refugee camps—and particularly women and girls—of having a lack of WASH facilities in these refugee camps?
Tim Wainwright: We are not a frontline humanitarian actor, so I will just make a few general comments, but others here might have more to say. We have worked a little bit in the Rohingya situation and in other humanitarian situations. The Rohingya one is quite an interesting one. It is a little bit similar to what I said earlier about rapid urbanisation, because the camp is like a city. We provided some technical expertise there on long-term sanitation solutions that will be resilient. How you cope with sanitation and water in a three-month situation is a different question than a situation that could last for a very long time.
More generally, the issues that face refugees mirror those faced by host populations, or populations wherever they are in the world, who lack access to water, sanitation and hygiene. There is a very major risk to public health. Cholera was mentioned earlier. Cholera is recurring. You tend to hear about it if a very large number of people are affected, but there are places around the world where it recurs every year. In Lusaka, Dar es Salaam, Zanzibar or parts of Bangladesh, it comes back year after year. It is a very similar map to the map of a lack of WASH.
Quite a lot of these issues overlap, but there are extra issues that apply to people who have either been displaced or are refugees, and I would defer to other witnesses on that question.
Md Abdul Alim: I would like to add one point that I may not have mentioned. In terms of the impact on women if WASH facilities are not working properly, if nearby water sources and WASH facilities are not working and not repaired, they have to go a further distance to use such facilities, which is not safe for them in the camps. It has a direct linkage with the increase in gender-based violence and even rape cases in the camps, so we can easily relate that with that one.
As I mentioned earlier, 22% of facilities require immediate care and maintenance servicing to ensure that all facilities are running. We are already facing that kind of challenge. Since most of our operation is with women and adolescent girls, they directly mention that, due to non-functional facilities, they are facing challenges in terms of collecting water, because they do not want to go far away. It is very densely populated, and maybe it is not so far by distance, but, if they go 50 metres away, they are in completely different communities that they are not very familiar with. Those kinds of cultural, protection and gender-based violence issues are there, and that is very visible nowadays due to this lack of WASH funding.
Q38 Kate Osamor: Nick, have the UK Government focused enough on ensuring access to WASH in aid programming, especially in support of long-term refugees?
Dr Hepworth: We do not really work with refugees, so I am not in a position to answer that.
Md Abdul Alim: I am sorry that I do not have that kind of analysis about UK funding, so maybe other colleagues can answer.
Tim Wainwright: We could follow up in more detail, but I do not have an answer off the top of my head now.
Anjil Adhikari: I do not have any experience of this.
Q39 Kate Osamor: Abdul, is the UK Government’s strategy towards long-term refugees inclusive of women and girls?
Md Abdul Alim: It is inclusive in the way that it is articulated, but we have a different definition of inclusiveness. We have to ensure women’s leadership in decision-making related to WASH, where their interest is greater. Until and unless we can ensure their participation not only in decision-making but in the management of water and sanitation sources and services, we do not believe that the response will be completely sensitive to women and adolescent girls. We need to rethink and review policies, including those of the UK, as to whether they adequately address that and ensure women’s leadership in this sector.
Dr Hepworth: Could I just make a final point? In terms of the adequacy of the response to emergencies and extreme events, I neglected to mention the response to the cholera epidemic in Malawi. The UN put out an appeal for $45 million to deal with the crisis. I got a call from my country manager just yesterday saying that Malawi is losing the war against cholera at the moment. The UK Government have so far committed £500,000, which is 1.3% of that appeal. If there is any way of getting a message through that there is more to be done there, that would be appreciated from our colleagues.
Chair: Our Committee plans to write with points that we want addressing by the Minister after this session, so we will make sure that that is one of them. Thank you very much for raising it.
Thank you all very much. I am now going to end this session. I appreciate all of your time.