If we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without access to water by 2015, we need to get clean water to an extra 150,000 people a day, every day, for the next ten years. This represents a major challenge to the global community. UK aid money is meant to help deliver this goal, but over the years our government has wasted millions of pounds in pushing a failed solution to the global water crisis – privatisation.

The World Development Movement’s (WDM) Dirty Aid, Dirty Water campaign calls on the UK government to stop misusing aid money to push a corporate takeover of the world’s water and to support public solutions to the global water crisis.


Privatisation a failed solution
For over a decade goprivate tap imagevernments and donors have forced water privatisation on developing countries as a condition of debt relief and aid. This ideological faith in the free market combined with a lack of understanding about alternative solutions has been a disaster for the world’s poor. From Bolivia to Argentina, the Philippines to Trinidad and Tobago, Tanzania to Guinea, case after case shows that privatisation does not work.
Big business is:

    * siphoning off profits to shareholders overseas
    * failing to invest
    * driving up prices

Critically, private companies have not significantly boosted the number of people connected to water.

Companies are now starting to withdraw from these projects, and the international debate is finally starting to shift away from privatisation, but where is it shifting to?