Water issues in developing countries
The main barriers to addressing water problems in developing nations include poverty, costs of infrastructure, and poor governance.
[2][3] Access to freshwater is unevenly distributed across the globe, with more than two billion people live in countries with significant water stress.
Agriculture's share of total water use is likely to fall in comparison with other sectors, but it will remain the largest user overall in terms of both withdrawal and consumption.
[11] This can happen due to an increase in the number of people in a region, changing living conditions and diets, and expansion of irrigated agriculture.
[23] It is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals: between 1990 and 2015 to "reduce by half the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation."
[25] Polluted drinking water can lead to debilitating or deadly water-borne diseases, such as fever, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea and others.
[24] UNICEF cites fecal contamination and high levels of naturally occurring arsenic and fluoride as two of the world's major water quality concerns.
[40] Much of water's physical pollution includes organisms, metals, acids, sediment, chemicals, waste, and nutrients.
[citation needed] A variety of innovations exist to effectively treat water at the point of use for human consumption.
Current point of use and small scale treatment technologies include: Central Asia Water and Energy Program (CAWEP) is a World Bank, European Union, Swiss & UK funded program to organize Central Asian governments on common water resources management through regional organizations, like the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS).
It aims to foster balanced communications between Central Asian countries to achieve a regional goal, water and energy security.
[46] Most recently, the program helped organize The Global Disruptive Tech Challenge: Restoring Landscapes in the Aral Sea Region.
This competition was created to encourage bright minds to come up with revolutionary solutions for land degradation and desertification in the Aral Sea Region, which used to be home to one of the largest lakes in the world and has since been reduced near to nothing.
There were several winning projects that centered around agriculture and land management, sustainable forestry, socio-economic development and globally expanding people knowledge and access to information on the issue.
[47] Aimed at achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 6, Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) was established as a platform for partnerships between governments, civil society, the private sector, UN agencies, research and learning institutions, and the philanthropic community.
SWA encourages partners to prioritize water, sanitation and hygiene along with ensuring sufficient finance and building better governance structures.
[51] In 2003, the United Nations High Level Committee on Programmes created UN-Water, an inter-agency mechanism, "to add value to UN initiatives by fostering greater co-operation and information-sharing among existing UN agencies and outside partners."
In contrast, 96% of people in urban areas have access to water sources and sanitation which meet satisfying quality.
[60] Surface water contamination, due to lack of sewage treatment and industrial discharge, makes groundwater increasingly exploited in many regions of India.
[59] This is aggravated by heavily subsidized energy costs for agriculture practices[59] that make up roughly 80% of India's water resource demand.
[63] The river receives about over 1.3 billion litres of domestic waste, along with 260 million litres of industrial waste, run off from 6 million tons of fertilizers and 9,000 tons of pesticides used in agriculture, thousands of animal carcasses and several hundred human corpses released into the river every day for spiritual rebirth.
This has exacerbated gender politics, as 74% of women must spend an average of 8 hours per day securing water for their families.
This regional inequality makes people in rural areas difficult to obtain water on a daily basis.
It also has aggravated the country's lack of access to clean drinking water which leaves most of the non-elite population suffering from disease.
Around 240 million people suffer from schistosomiasis which occurs because of parasitic worms that may be contracted through drinking infested waters.
[66] Unfortunately, since Kenya's government also refuses to provide services, this leaves the disenfranchised with no options for obtaining clean water.
Water supply and sanitation in Panama is characterized by relatively high levels of access compared to other Latin American countries.
Panama has a tropical climate and receives abundant rainfall (up to 3000mm per year), yet the country still suffers from limited water access and pollution.
Multiple factors like urbanization, impacts of climate change, and economic development have decreased water resources.
[74] An estimated 7.5-31% of Panama's population lives in isolated rural areas with minimal access to potable water and few sewage treatment facilities.
