Impressions of the Third World Water Forum

Thursday, March 20^th

Today, we are a little bit lost: After all those months of preparation we had our session at the World Water Forum yesterday. It was successful, but now it’s over and today we have to regroup. Well, our first mission is to write the session report so that it can be put on the website (http://ap.world.water-forum3.com/themewwf/en/sessiondetail.06?id=297session water&info, Translating awareness into concrete actions)

In our meetings with delegates from other countries and organizations we discuss what we think should be the outcome of this forum. Some very hot topics are discussed over the week and also return in these discussions: Water is a basic human right. Therefore, it should be accessible to each individual on earth, the water should be of good quality at a fair price and we should be prudent with it, so that both the environment and the next generations will be able to enjoy this precious gift of mother Nature. Without water, sustainable development and poverty eradication is not possible.

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg last year, the world leaders committed themselves to a plan of action to implement the UN Millennium Development Goals on water: To halve by 2015 the number of people in the world that have no access to fresh drinking water and also to halve the number of people that have no sanitation.

Many of the discussions at this forum are centred on themes as access, ownership, development, poverty eradication, gender aspects and sustainability. There are very strong voices against privatisation of drinking water from NGO’s from many countries, but also there are promising examples of successes that were reached because of cooperation between governments, business and industry, NGO’s and knowledge institutes. So far, emphasis has been put mainly on public-private partnerships, but we believe that it is important to involve other stakeholders as well:

By involving NGO’s, local communities, pressure groups and individuals to participate in finding solutions for local water problems, stakeholders can take up their role to influence government and business to act on sustainable solutions. In the evening there was a discussion between the Dutch Minister of Development Cooperation and NGO’s. As members of Junior Chamber International, who is one of the NGO’s at this forum, we put this argument forward. We were happy to see that the Minister agreed and also used this statement in the ministerial conference.

Dutch Minister speaking on outcome