Interview

Edward D. (Ned) Breslin is CEO of Water for People, a non-governmental organization that promotes creative, collaborative solutions to allow people to build and maintain their own reliable safe water systems. He talked to GLOBAL IDEAS about how clean and safe water for developing nations can be made a reality.

GLOBAL IDEAS: Why is sanitation so important for developing countries?

Ned Breslin: I don't think that any country in the world has developed without sorting out their water and sanitation problems. If you look at the emergence and growth of Europe and North America, it really happened when water and sanitation stopped being a problem. I think developing countries are in the same situation. Until you sort out these basic blocks of development, I don't think developing countries are going to be able to really reach their true potential.

Many organizations believe that the Millennium Goals (a set of targets to reduce global poverty and improve living standards by 2015) failed mainly because governments did not make them a priority. Do you think governments should take more action?

I worked overseas for 20 years. I think national governments and international aid are absolutely interested and worried about water and sanitation. I think there is plenty of money for development aid. But there is a big difference between the money that is available for water and sanitation work and the money that is actually spent. In average, we just spend between 20 and 25 percent. Last year in India, it was two billion dollars of unspent water money.

You've said that conventional approaches on sanitation and water supply are not sustainable. Why is that?

For two reasons. First, there are huge challenges around the world with declining water quantities and deteriorating quality. And so a lot of things are happening to infrastructure that require action. And the structure has to be flexible: If you want to sustain everyone, you have also got to think that infrastructure will grow as communities grow and change. Most conventional approaches to water and sanitation delivery assume none of those will happen. Second, conventional approaches focus on infrastructure, with perhaps a token amount of time spent on management and finance.

Instead of constantly complaining about the lack of aid or projects, we have to think how we can strategically use the money we have, how we can access money that is available locally from government and from communities to utilize together, to implement projects and programs we do think can make a change.

How should projects be organized instead?

Building infrastructure in places is the first step. But then we have to make sure that infrastructure is managed properly. There has to be finance in place to make sure that spares can be bought, that technical support can be accessed, that the infrastructure can be replaced. And you have to monitor the projects in the first years and intervene if things are going off-track. And the big outcome is that these areas will never need an international water NGO ever again.

Michaela Führer interviewed Ned Breslin (sp)