Conference Supports Private Water, Sanitation

Talk of shifting donor funding from NGOs and the government to private companies dominated a conference held Tuesday on im­proving access to clean water and sanitation in rural Cambodia.

Trent Eddy, director of Strategic Management Solutions, a consulting firm, said donor agencies like the World Bank should fund private companies to install facilities in rural areas, “where there is a profitable opportunity for the private sector.” The ultimate goal, he added, was for local residents to pay for water, once they are able.

Unlike many countries facing wa­ter crises, Cambodia has a  water surplus. But poor sanitation in the provinces has led to widespread contamination. Bacterial diarrhea is a leading cause of death among children and adults in Cambodia.

Conference participants also cited naturally occurring arsenic in the Mekong region as an emerging problem. Louis George Arsen­ault, country rep­resentative for the UN Children’s Fund, announced during the conference that Unicef would donate $375,000 to test wells in at-risk areas.

Though access to water and sanitation has a direct relationship to poverty and public health, organizations must also induce the rural population to include latrines and clean water into their lives.

World Health Organization en­vir­onmental engineer Steven Idding said “a nice toilet” should be presented as a status symbol, instead of for health benefits. Mar­ket­ing “appearance and taste” could decide how well villagers change their habits, he cautioned.

Tapley Jordan, a rural development specialist at Partners for Development, said he approved of such plans in the relatively affluent areas studied by Eddy, such as Takeo and Battambang provinces. In poorer areas unlikely to attract corporate attention, he said facilities should be improved through village entrepreneurs, an area that remains the domain of NGOs.

According to Julien Calas, director of the French Development Agency’s Phnom Penh office, the next step is to “help the private sector invest.”

In accordance with worldwide “New Millennium” objectives, the conference laid out the goal of having 50 percent of Cambodians with access to clean water and sanitation facilities by 2015, and total access by 2025.

According to reports circulated at the conference, only 25 percent of rural Cambodians currently have access to clean water during the dry season. Ten percent have access to sanitation facilities.

By Alex Halperin

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