Water Resources and Urbanization

Today we had a participatory approach on our lecture which in practice meant that we were divided into groups and were supposed to think of problems and solutions from their perspective. The case in point was Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and my group was assigned the position as village people from the outskirts. We did not have access to tap water and we do not know if our groundwater is clean or not (apparently there is only one laboratory in Cambodia that can do the tests necessary) and to make matters worse there was a factory nearby that uses the groundwater and now the level has begun to lower.

The reason for this particular case has (in my opinion) something to do with the Asian Development Bank calling the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority (PPWSA) ”An Exemplary Water Utility in Asia”. Between the years 1993 and 2006 they lowered the percentage of non revenue water from 72 to 6, increased their total connections from 26,000 to 147,000 and now they supply water 24hrs/day instead of only 10hrs. I mean, it is a HUGE change (you can read more here: http://www.adb.org/water/actions/CAM/PPWSA.asp), they even turn a profit nowadays. This goes to show that with a little education, a lot of willpower and the right people at the right place at the right time anything can happen.

The PPWSA are doing a lot for the poor community too which would most likely not have been done if they had remained the corrupted government organization it once was. In large parts of the poorer world corruption is a big problem; however it might not be considered a ‘problem’ there in the sense that it is “common practice” and “the way business is done”, which is something most people (and organizations) forget when donating money for a cause. They want to just send the money because sending people from the western world would cost so much and that would take away from the sum donated. What they forget is that once the money gets to the place where it is needed it has gone through a lot of corrupted pockets and even more of the money goes lost. This is not to say that there are not corrupted people in the richer parts of the world, not long ago the Red Cross had some issues with a communications chief who swindled millions of SEK from the organizations. Then of course we have the salary of half a million USD for the CEO of the Red Cross. One might take a minute to think why they need volunteers if they can afford to pay that amount to one single person.

But back to the case, we discussed what could be done and a lot of good ideas came to light. Most of which were quite feasible from an engineering standpoint but several times we were reminded of the mindset of the people involved and asked if we had thought of that. The truth is that the whole situation becomes that much harder to solve when you have to account for the people. For one we (my group) thought it would be a swell idea to only have one connection in our village to save money and have the village chief (or someone else) to distribute the water from there and charge for the usage. It took the lecturer about two seconds to point out that in a village where they have water, those with access to the connection collects water in tanks and sell to the other poor people in their community for a large (percentage-vise) profit.

And once again have we gotten to the gist of the problem: human behavior. I mean, the ‘actual’ problem can be solved by engineers, it only needs money. The money can be gotten either as a donation or as an affordable loan (this is solved by the economists), if we look at the PPWSA again we see that they now turn a profit but before they got there it did cost a lot of money. So think about it this way: if we remove people from the equation or assume they behave in a logical matter then it is quite simple to calculate when a certain venture will turn a profit and guarantee a profit. This would make for a sound investment and thus money would be no problem.

From this it stands to reason that unless we are able to change the mindset of people then we cannot hope for a sustainable solution but that does not mean we should not try.