According to the UN, World Water Day, March 22, will focus this year on the theme, ‘Glacier Preservation,’ highlighting the critical role of glaciers in sustaining life and the water cycle. Glaciers, mountain run-off, and snowmelt provide nearly two billion people with water for drinking, agriculture, and energy production.
By Lyla Mehta
BRIGHTON, UK, Mar 21 2025 – The principle of leaving no one behind is central to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The progress toward achieving SDG 6, which aims to ensure universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene by 2030 is increasingly under threat with recent development funding cuts posing a significant barrier.
As humanitarian funding diminishes, vital water and sanitation projects, especially in low-income and crisis-affected regions, are facing severe setbacks. This World Water Day, humanitarian efforts are at a critical juncture and the consequences of inadequate support could leave millions without basic human rights of clean water and safe sanitation, further hindering global development.
Since Donald Trump took office for the second time, the US has cut close to 90% of its USAID budget with massive implications for global health, life-saving humanitarian efforts, water and food systems. Followed by the US budget cut, British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer announced a budget cut to the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) from 0.5% of the gross national income to 0.3%, ostensibly to beef-up defence spending – (this is well below the UN’s 0.7% target for ODA contributions). Other European countries like the Netherlands, France and Switzerland have also slashed their aid budgets.
These cuts have a huge impact on basic needs such as clean water and sanitation as some of the poorest countries in the world depend on USAID for over a fifth of their total assistance – making up about 11% of their income. The recent USAID cuts have left 50,000 people in Colombia, more than 270,000 people in Mali, and more than 400,000 people in Northern Burkina Faso without access to basics such as clean water.
There is a lot to criticise about foreign aid, not least due to how increasing amounts have been diverted to serve national or business interests, sometimes never leaving the donor country in the first place, such as the UK government spending ODA on housing asylum seekers.
Yet we must not forget that aid saves lives, about 3.3 million people per year from USAID alone according to recent estimates. The implications will be catastrophic for countries already struggling to meet their SDG targets. Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) targets under SDG 6 face particular challenges.
Back in 2020, UNICEF and WHO stated that “With only 10 years left until 2030, the rate at which sanitation coverage is increasing will need to quadruple if the world is to achieve the SDG sanitation targets”. Sanitation is already one of the most off-track SDGs. With these cuts, it’s very unlikely that sanitation coverage can be quadrupled to meet the SDG targets.
Globally, 800,000 children die every year due to diarrheal disease. According to WHO, 44% of children with diarrhoea in low-income countries receive the recommended treatment with little progress since 2000. As diarrheal disease burden ramps up on children and other vulnerable communities, morbidity and mortality will increase, not decline.
Recently, the Gates Foundation abruptly stopped its support for City-Wide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS), a programme that has played a critical role in promoting non-sewered sanitation systems in many parts of the global South. This has already had consequences on the 1.5 billion people without access to sanitation.
Everybody sh..ts, and the sh..t needs to be safely contained, especially in rapidly urbanising areas of the global South, as found by the Towards Brown Gold research project. Clean water is crucial for human wellbeing, planetary health and our agricultural and industrial economies.
Poor access to water and sanitation has serious implications for climate adaptation, girls’ education as well as food, health and nutrition security.
The aid cuts from the global North could also mean that global South nations find ways to prioritise and support basic services in their own countries, rather than rely on aid. But this is a long-term project and requires substantial political -economic rewiring. In the short-term, Ugandans are already reeling with thousands of jobs being lost, supply chains affected and wider economic ripples felt throughout the economy.
The looming end of the global consensus on the need for egalitarianism, humanitarianism and solidarity for the poorest and most vulnerable should terrify all of us. Yet these trends are not new. Under Boris Johnson at the height of the global pandemic, the UK already cut the WASH budget by 80% in 2021.
The cut of about £4 Billion (from £150 Million in 2019 to £30 million in WASH 2021) alone plunged millions around the world into water insecurity and led to unnecessary illness and deaths, especially of children.
Since October 2023, Israel has deprived aid to two million Palestinians living in Gaza and denied them even the barest minimum access to water and sanitation. The denial of fuel and electricity has led to a collapse in desalination plants, reducing water supplies for drinking, washing, and sanitation.
This deliberate denial of basic rights to water and sanitation has led to thousands of deaths, over and above 60,000 deaths due to malnutrition (also linked to lack of access to WASH).
By insufficiently condemning or sanctioning Israel due to these gross violations of established international law and global human rights, the Gaza genocide has revealed the callousness and hypocrisy of the global North and the wider international community. Current aid cuts build on this callous indifference and dehumanisation of black and brown lives in the Middle East, Africa and beyond.
While the US Government appears proud to destroy USAID due to the nationalist ‘America First project, we expect better from European countries. The UK government’s aid cuts are morally vacuous and indefensible. For one, the UK looks diminished on the global stage, especially in the eyes of emerging economies and the majority world.
You can’t ‘save the world’ from security threats if insecurities increase – and economic and social insecurities breed political insecurity. The UK and other European nations need to listen to Keynes’ advice from 1941 and further tax the super-wealthy of which there are many.
This is a less painful way to meet increased defence and social spending without compromising on aid budgets and the basic rights including access to clean water and sanitation of the world’s most vulnerable people. We all share the same global system, after all.
Professor Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and a Visiting Professor at Noragric, the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She trained as a sociologist (University of Vienna) and has a PhD in Development Studies (University of Sussex). Her work focuses on the water and sanitation, climate change, transformation, rights, resource grabbing and the politics of sustainability, scarcity and uncertainty.
IPS UN Bureau
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