ADDIS ABABA, 9 December 2003 — Hundreds of government ministers, UN officials, donors and scientists gathered in the Ethiopian capital yesterday at the start of a six-day conference aimed at easing Africa’s safe water crisis.
Some 65 percent of people living in rural Africa lack access to adequate supplies of safe water while 73 percent do not have proper sanitation facilities, Egyptian Minister of Water Resources Mahmoud Abu-Zeid said at the opening of the meeting.
“Access to water, a basic human need, still eludes a large portion of our populace,” K.Y. Amako the executive secretary of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa, which is hosting the conference, told delegates.
“Poor management of this precious gift of nature, therefore, continues to hinder our progress and is a major constraint factor in food production, health and industrial development,” he added.
“We know that we can significantly reduce the proportion of people without access to adequate safe water and sanitation if we implement policies that stress better household water-quality management and improved family hygiene,” he added.
“We owe it to our children and grandchildren to address all these concerns, if we fail to do so, history will not judge us kindly,” he warned.
“The challenges the African continent is facing at this time are simply too complex for one or two countries’ governments to tackle alone. We need governments, non-governmental organizations, institutions and the private sector to work together towards poverty reduction,” said the Egyptian minister.
The conference will examine the best ways of implementing policies enshrined in documents such as the UN’s Millennium Declaration, which calls for the number of people lacking access to safe water to be halved by 2015.
