De l'eau pour tous ?

Water for everybody?

Suez, Lyonnaise des Eaux

Abstract

The experience that Lyonnaise des Eaux has acquired in its contracts in Argentina has shown up the problem of serving districts with low financial resources, under the general conditions of a contract which does not take into account the capacity to pay of the poorest populations.

As this problem is also encountered in the contracts of La Paz. Manila, Jakarta, Casablanca etc., it was urgent to undertake a reflection on the subject. A project was financed in 1997.

Before tackling the heart of the subject, it is useful to recall some basic ideas forming the basis of the reflection.

One can observe a substantial increase in the number of cities with populations of more than a million: 157 in 1975, 320 in 2000. It is estimated that a large part of the people without access to drinking water or sanitation (1000 million and 2900 million respectively) live in underprivileged urban environments.

In underprivileged districts, the technical impossibility (no roads or even any trace of them), the institutional impossibility (occupation of the land which is often illegal) and the financial impossibility (cost of a normal type of supply by a network with connections, relative to the population's capacity to pay) of providing in the short term a conventional water supply and sanitation service to the populations concerned constitute a considerable problem.

The report proposes an approach wich best allows the situation of underpriviliged districts to he dealt with. This approach may be summarized as follows:

- Development of appropriate contracts,

- Integration of the problem of underprivileged districts into the Master Plan as far upstream as possible,

- Implementation of transitory and progressive solutions.