Asia water day highlights leadership role in solving region

Inspired leaders who champion reforms, mobilize resources and involve communities can play a key role in helping Asia meet its many water and sanitation supply challenges, says Xianbin Yao, acting director general of Asian Development Bank's Regional and Sustainable Development Department.

Speaking in Stockholm, Sweden at the first ever Asia Water Day to be held during World Water Week, Yao says water resources in the rapidly growing region of over four billion people are coming under extreme pressure as a result of urbanization and industrialization, pollution, and climate-induced natural disasters.

Underpinning these problems has been poor management, with political interference and misunderstandings about how to improve the delivery of water and sanitation services, commonplace.

In contrast to the region’s booming growth, water infrastructure and the capacity to manregage it lags well behind.

“What Asia needs is not just more financing. It needs better management,” says Yao.

On a broader scale, there are also positive developments, with the number of people in the region without safe drinking water dropping by over 40% between 1990 and 2006, and those without improved sanitation, down by 14%. In South Asia, where not a single city has 24-hour water supply, India, aided by a national reform program, may meet its Millennium Development Goal water targets early.