NAIROBI, Kenya — Africa’s poor are caught in the thick of a festering global water and sanitation crisis linked to pervasive violation of the basic human right to water by skewed power relations within and between states. In Africa, as elsewhere in the developing world, lack of clean water and toilets is taking a heavy toll on human security, and is a deadlier killer than the continent’s endemic conflicts. Lack of clean water has caused the avoidable deaths of no less than 2 million children, led to the loss of wealth and livelihoods, widened the gender gap, eroded ecological systems, undermined regional cooperation and raised the spectre ‘water wars’, says the Human Development Report 2006 released last week by the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) in Cape Town, South Africa. A well-financed Global Action Plan is central to reducing the devastation of the water crisis. But the Global Action Plan must be rooted in air-tight national strategies, argues the UNDP Report entitled Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis. Beyond the scarcity debate The 2006 report takes off from the idyllic starting point that there is enough water for every soul on planet […]