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Mexico in the Context of Latin America International Competition
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Water and Human Development: The Millennium Development Goals |
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 At the turn of the 21st Century, the international community laid out a global anti-poverty agenda known as the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs. The MDGs are a set of eight key objectives related to development that provide a comprehensive framework for addressing the root causes of poverty by the year 2015. MDG 7 (Ensuring Environmental Sustainability and Reversing the Loss of Environmental Resources) explicitly mentions water issues. Its target is to reduce by half the proportion of the world’s population without access to water and adequate sanitation. However, as illustrated in a 2006 UN Human Development Report, the achievement of all the MDGs is to some extent dependent on water, though the role of water often goes unstated. Consider these examples: MDG | Role of Water | 1 – Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger |
- Preventing disease and loss of productivity, freeing up women and girls to go to school and work
- Growing nutritious and adequate food
- Averting prohibitive costs of purchasing water
- Contributing to industry
| 2 – Achieve universal primary education |
- Eliminating time-consuming water procurement to allow children to attend school and parents to pay attention to their schooling
- Sanitation facilities for girls that encourage school attendance
- Better health for better school attendance
| 3 – Promote gender equality and empower women |
- Reliable, convenient water supplies mean that generations of womenare freed from onerous water procurement and can pursue education,training, and employment in numbers commensurate to men
- Less water-related disease means less time spent caring for the sick
- Separate quality sanitation facilities enhance sense of personal dignity
- Less maternal mortality
| 4 – Reduce child mortality |
- Most diarrheal deaths are preventable with improved water access and quality
- Other water-borne and water-related diseases can be reduced with better access to clean and adequate supplies
| 5 – Improve maternal health |
- Drastically reduced water-related diseases
- Less diversion of health care dollars for preventable water-related illnesses
- Better childbirth conditions
| 6 – Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases |
- Less incidence of disease, better outcomes for the sick
- Water for making formula for the babies of HIV-positive mothers to prevent transmission
- Less dirty standing water means fewer mosquito breeding grounds
| 7 – Ensure environmental sustainability and reverse the loss of environmental resources |
- Protection and preservation of water supplies is key to ecosystem health and combating climate change
| 8 – Develop a global partnership for development |
- See all of the above. Global development and progress on global inequalities are not possible without attention to water.
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Adapted from The UN Development Report, 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty, and the Global Water Crisis, p. 22-23. Next: A Framework for Understanding: Water as a Human Right
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