There is no resource more vital to man than water. However, today access to this precious commodity is very inequitable.
According to the United Nations (UN), today a quarter of humanity does not have access to a safe source of water.
It is the poorest population in the world. And, in general rules, access to water is determined by economic capacity.
The richer a country is, the wider its coverage network. And, in developing or underdeveloped countries, wealthier populations have more water availability than poorer ones, and urban populations more than rural ones.
But this does not happen everywhere. There is one country in particular that is considered an example that you don’t have to be rich to be able to provide water to the entire population equally.
In this note we explain how Paraguay, a small Mediterranean country anchored between Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, managed to guarantee universal access to water for its population, with a more equitable distribution than that of the wealthiest countries in the region.
“A question of governance”
Part of the problem with access to water has to do with it being a scarce commodity.
While our planet contains more water than land, more than 97% is salt water, unfit for human consumption or irrigation.
And of that 3% of fresh water, two-thirds is frozen, either in glaciers or ice.
This means that the planet’s nearly 8 billion people depend either on the very few sources of non-salt surface water (lakes, swamps and rivers, which account for less than 1% of total freshwater) or on groundwater, which is our main source.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “groundwater provides half of all water used by households around the world, a quarter of all water used for irrigated agriculture, and one-third of the water supply required for industry.”
But to take advantage of that resource under the ground – where it exists – requires equipment and investment, and to bring it to homes you have to build a distribution network.
This is why the human factor is key to explaining the inequities that exist in access to water.
“The global water crisis today is mainly a question of governance rather than resource availability“, said recently the regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Luis Felipe López-Calva.
“Water is a basic service and a human right that states must guarantee equally to all citizens, no matter where they live in the territory or how much they can pay for the service,” he said.
López-Calva denounced that “in Latin America and the Caribbean, as in much of the world, access to water continues to be very uneven“.
But he stressed that “these inequalities are not inevitable,” and as an example he cited Paraguay.
Latin America’s 15th economy has “almost universal coverage of access to drinking water,” he said.
But Paraguay’s merits don’t end there, he said. Compared to other Latin American nations that also guarantee a basic service to almost all its population, such as Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, this South American country is distinguished by being the one that distributes water in a more equitable way.
“In Latin America and the Caribbean, as in much of the world, access to water remains very unequal,” the UNDP regional director recently warned.
“In Paraguay there is less than 2 percentage points of difference in access to water between rural/urban areas or between the richest/poorest groups,” said the UNDP official.
This makes it the country in the region with more equitable access to water.
And not only from the region. Paraguay has also been recognized by the NGO Water Aid for being one of the countries in the world that most increased the distribution of water to rural regions.
At the beginning of this century, about half of the inhabitants of these areas had access to this precious resource, a figure that today Doubled.
A Spokeswoman for Water Aid told BBC World that, according to the most recent figures compiled in 2020 by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP), the 99.6% of Paraguayans they have at least “basic access” to water.
The engineer Sara López, maximum rResponsible for guaranteeing access to drinking water in the country, he explained that the key to success was a law enacted 50 years ago by the then de facto government of Alfredo Stroessner.
Law 369, of 1972, created the body that López directs today: the National Environmental Sanitation Service of Paraguay (Senasa).
But it is not the typical government agency that is responsible for distributing water.
Because the same law implemented a new community model that decentralized water management, creating a new figure: the Sanitation Joints, who receive technical assistance and training from Senasa.
“They are community organizations made up of neighbors from each locality, and they are the ones who operate and maintain the water systems,” López told BBC Mundo.
Assembly of a Sanitation Board in Paraguay.
The official estimated that currently in Paraguay operate some 4,000 Sanitation Boards, ranging from the smallest, in the smallest villages, to the largest, which are responsible for bringing water to up to 50,000 inhabitants.
There are also another 1,000 Sanitation Commissions, as community groups that have not yet obtained legal status granted by the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare, on which Senasa depends, are known.
Another peculiarity of the water law is that it put the agency that is responsible for supervising the distribution of this precious resource under the orbit of that portfolio, since, according to López, access to a safe water source is a “preventive health” theme.
Sanitation Boards
López explained that the Boards are made up of just five people: a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer and member, who are elected through a Constitutive Assembly.
“They work ad honorem, do not receive a salary or diet and are replaced every five years,” he said.
However operate “as a commercial enterprise, hiring operators, administrators, technicians and plumbers” among others.
These professionals do receive a salary, which is obtained from the fees charged for water.
“There is a basic rate for a basic monthly consumption, which is 12,000 to 15,000 liters per month, and whoever uses more pays more,” said the official.
As for prices, “the first rate is defined with the help of Senasa, but then each Assembly determines the prices.”
IMAGE SOURCE,SENASA
Lopez says that “water is cheap in Paraguay”, since you pay on average about US $ 3 per 12,000 liters.
How water is obtained
“The Sanitation Boards can operate the systems because they are simple,” the official explained.
“A well of about 150 meters is drilled and the water is pumped into an elevated tank, from where it is distributed by gravity. It doesn’t need another kind of pumping,” he says.
The drilling is in charge of Senasa, which also usually provides the water tanks.
“The system is simple to operate and maintain for people who are not very qualified,” says the official.
“As the water that comes out of the well is from good quality, the only thing we ask is that the system be disinfected,” he says.
For his part, Walter Godoy, Senasa’s project assistant, explained to BBC Mundo that the State finances 82% of the works, while the communities contribute the rest.
“15% of the costs of the community is the labor to install the pipe and the properties where they are placed, and only 3% is paid in cash, which is equivalent to between US $ 70 and US $ 100,” he said.
The communities are responsible for installing the pipe.
“In indigenous communities, the State finances 100% of the works,” he added.
This virtuous community system, which takes advantage of the availability of groundwater, has allowed Paraguay to duplicate access to safe water in a few decades.
“In the 90s we had a coverage of 50% of the country, but with this model we were able to quickly and strongly increase coverage throughout the republic,” says López.
“If we compare this increase with that experienced by other countries, Paraguay stands out as one of the countries that has improved the most in the world” said López-Calva, from UNDP.
“This change is not the result of a sudden increase in the amount of water available in the country, but the result of intentional investments to improve water governance,” he said.
Sara López, general director of Senasa, and the president pAraguayo, Mario Abdo Benítez, receive recognition from the Ñupy San Rafael community, after inaugurating a new water well.
What’s missing
Although the system of Sanitation Boards has allowed Paraguay to bring water to almost its entire population, there is a small strip that remains excluded, recognizes the general director of Senasa.
“In the eastern region of the country, where 97% of the population lives, there is abundant groundwater and there the most vulnerable and most dispersed populations are covered, but in the Paraguayan Chaco, in the east, there are many indigenous communities, about 200,000 people, and there the source is more difficult because groundwater is salty” he explained.
For this reason, there the main source of water is the collection of rainwater, a process hindered by the extreme drought that the region has experienced in the last two years.
The indigenous communities of the Chaco use tanks to collect rainwater, which function as community cisterns.
“I think that in the Chaco we are not reaching the poorest populations, at least not in a sustainable way, because we arrived, but after a while we have to return,” the official lamented.
“That one. is the pending matter, where we must make the greatest effort.”
