The
conference included the following sessions:
I.
Opening, Plenary and Panel Discussion
II-A. Drinking Water – New Technologies and Applications
II-B: Wastewater – New Technologies and Applications
III-A: Sector Roles, Project Finance, and Marketing of Goods
and Services
III-B: Solid Waste Management and Wastewater Infrastructure
IV-A: Demonstration Projects – Operation, Monitoring,
Regulation and Sustainability
IV-B: Infrastructure: Planning and Managing
Following the conference, a one-day field trip was offered,
which visited a wastewater treatment plant and two water
treatment plants, all in the suburbs of Chicago. Our
international visitors, especially those from the Dominican
Republic and Mexico, found this field trip to be particularly
interesting and useful. They were not only interested in
the technology, but in management arrangements and procedures
that result in the safe and efficient operation of the treatment
plants.
The PowerPoint presentations from the conference, are
available by clicking “PRESENTATIONS” on the navigation bar near
the upper left corner of the webpage.
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3.
UPCOMING INTER-AMERICAN AIDIS CONFERENCE TO BE HELD IN
URUGUAY
The 30th biennial
congress (conference) of AIDIS-Interamericana will
take place in Punta del Este, Uruguay, from November 26-30,
2006. This is the major periodic event for our 35,000
member association, with participants expected from every
nation in the Americas. It is an opportunity to share
professional experiences, learn, and make contacts with
colleagues from throughout the Americans. It is also
an opportunity to enjoy a the beautiful beach city of Punta
del Este, just as the South American summer begins.
Note: This
year Thanksgiving falls on November 23rd, so one can get to
the November 26th start of the congress without missing
Thanksgiving with your family.
For more
information, go to the conference website at
www.aidis2006.org
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RECENT GUEST SPEAKERS AT AIDIS-USA
LUNCHEON MEETINGS:
4.
The Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005
On June 6, 2006, USAIDIS had a special luncheon meeting with
Judah Ariel, who briefed us on the "Senator Paul Simon Water
for the Poor Act." Judah Ariel is the foreign
policy aide to Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore), a member
of the House International Relations Committee. He served as
the lead staff on the act (H.R.1973, P.L.109-121).
The Water for the Poor Act makes increasing access to safe
drinking water and sanitation a cornerstone of United States
foreign assistance and establishes a Millennium Development
Goal in U.S. law for the first time.
After
overwhelming passage in the House and unanimous passage in
the Senate, President Bush signed the Senator Paul Simon
Water for the Poor Act (Public Law 109-121) into law on
November 30, 2005.
The
remainder of this article has been taken from the website of
Congressman Blumenauer:
HR 1973 "Water for the Poor Act complete text, click: (*.PDF
version) (*.Word
version)
Section by Section Summary of Water for the Poor Act, click
(*.PDF
version) (*.Word
version)
H.R.1973, The Senator
Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005
Section by Section
Summary
I. Short
Title
Names the
bill: “The Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of
2005”
II.
Findings
Makes a
series of findings on the state of access to water and
sanitation, the impact of the global water crisis,
international agreements on water and sanitation, and the
role of water in conflict.
III.
Statement of Policy
States the
policy of the United States to:
·
increase
water assistance to high-priority countries,
·
provide the
right balance in forms of assistance to ensure affordability
and equity for the very poor,
·
provide the
right balance in assistance to urban, periurban, and rural
areas,
·
ensure that
the forms of assistance reflect the level of resources and
the existence (or lack of existence) of water investment
markets in the recipient country,
·
support
recipient country’s poverty-reduction strategies and urge
the inclusion of water and sanitation in those strategies,
·
promote
country and local ownership of water and sanitation
programs,
·
promote
community-based approaches and the involvement of
civil-society,
·
promote
public-private alliances,
·
promote
policy reforms and capacity building in recipient countries,
·
and protect
the supply of clean water through environmental management.
IV.
Sense of Congress
States the
sense of Congress in support of:
·
innovative
international coordination mechanisms
·
greatly
increasing the amount of money going to water and sanitation
assistance
V.
Assistance to Provide Safe Water and Sanitation
Amends the
Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to include a new section on
water and sanitation. Purposes of assistance include:
·
the goal of
cutting in half the percentage of people without access to
safe water and sanitation by 2015,
·
focusing
assistance where its needed most,
·
promoting
affordability and equity,
·
promoting
improved water efficiency,
·
promoting
innovative funding mechanisms,
·
promoting
private investment in a responsible fashion,
·
and
promoting recipient government capacity.
Activities
supported include:
·
the design,
construction, maintenance, repair, upkeep, and operation of
water and sanitation systems,
·
improving
the safety and reliability of water supplies, including
environmental management,
·
improving
the capacity of recipient governments and local communities.
VI. Safe
Water and Sanitation Strategy
Requires
the Secretary of State to develop, and USAID to implement, a
strategy to further the goals added by Section 5 that is
consistent with the policy in Section 3. The strategy
includes:
·
specific
and measurable goals, benchmarks, and timetables,
·
an
assessment of the levels of funding needed,
·
methods to
better integrate water and sanitation into other US
development objectives,
·
methods to
better coordinate US programs with other donors,
·
an
assessment of the policies of recipient governments in terms
of water and an assessment of current US water and
sanitation assistance programs,
·
sanitation,
·
and the
designation of high-priority counties.
VII.
Monitoring Requirement
Requires
the Secretary of State and the USAID Administer to monitor
the assistance provided to ensure that it is making a
difference and not being lost to corruption.
VIII.
Development of Local Capacity
Sense of
Congress in support of expanding efforts to train local
officials and water & sanitation managers.
IX.
Additional Water and Sanitation Programs
Sense of
Congress in support of UN water and sanitation assistance
programs and encouraging the inclusion of water and
sanitation in the development efforts of the multilateral
development banks.
X. Water
for Peace and Security
Sense of
Congress in support of efforts to develop watershed-wide
mechanisms for governance and cooperation. Requests report
on US programs to support such efforts.
XI.
Authorization of Appropriations
Authorizes
such sums as may be necessary to carry out the act.
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5.
SANITATION AND HYGIENE LENDING BY THE WORLD BANK
At our luncheon on February 8, 2006, our guest speaker was
Eduardo (Eddy) Perez, of the World Bank (and a former member of
the Board of Directors of USAIDIS). Mr. Perez's presentation
focused on the Bank's lending in the sanitation and hygiene
sector. A recent analysis of sanitation and hygiene sector
lending (globally) by the Bank was discussed, as well as new
initiatives at the Bank to promote increased lending in the
sector while improving the quality of new sanitation projects.
Mr. Perez included examples and insights specific to the sector
in Latin America.
The remainder of this article is taken from the websites:
www.worldbank.org/watsan and
www.wsp.org. These are both World Bank websites which
correspond to the information presented by Mr. Perez at the
luncheon.
Improving water supply and sanitation (WSS) is
key to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. It is
at the core of the World Bank’s mission to reduce poverty. The
World Bank is the world's largest external financier of water
supply and sanitation and is recognized as a lead agency in
terms of sector knowledge and analytics.
The
World Bank is committed to reaching the Millennium
Development Goals in water supply and sanitation
(WSS). The overarching premise of the World Bank Group’s
business model is to ensure efficient, affordable, and
sustainable delivery of WSS services.
The
World Bank adopts a comprehensive strategy
and policy to sector development. Assistance for
WSS focuses on supporting client countries in four areas:
-
Extending WSS services to the
urban poor;
-
Improving operator
performance;
-
Increasing rural access to
sustainable WSS;
-
Better managing the water
resource base.
Access to sanitation services is much lower in most countries
than access to water supply and sanitation. The World Bank is
making a concerted effort to increase the quantity and improve
the impact of Bank-funded investments in sanitation
and hygiene.
* FY - Fiscal Year, 12 month period ending June 30
The lending portfolio in WSS is over US$6 million. After a
decline in the late nineties, lending is on the rise. In the
past two years, the World Bank approved approximately US$1.5
million in new lending to client countries for WSS sector per
year. The World Bank is thus the largest external financier in
the sector.
At
the World
Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, the
governments of the world pledged themselves to halve the
fraction of the world’s population without access to basic
sanitation by 2015. This commitment was made in recognition of
the high costs of inadequate sanitation including:
Meeting the sanitation goal calls for a wide range of measures,
including policy reforms, hygiene
promotion, capacity building, use of
participatory processes, and adherence to demand-responsive
approaches. It also calls for a massive scaling up of
investments and sustainable service delivery.
The
World Bank has for years been a leading external investor in sanitation
and wastewater management in developing
countries. Current World Bank lending for sanitation and
wastewater management is US$2.6 billion, which is 35 percent
of the total World Bank water supply and sanitation lending
portfolio. Much of this investment continues to
be in urban sewage and wastewater treatment in pursuit of
environmental protection goals. Demand-responsive low-cost
on-site sanitation in rural areas and small
towns and wastewater management for the poor
living in more densely populated urban informal areas are
increasingly part of World Bank projects. In rural
areas, these projects use an extended web of
community-based organizations, local artisans, and contractors
in partnership with local and national governments to provide
sanitation services at scale. In urban areas, the World Bank is
becoming more active in basic sanitation by supporting both
on-site sanitation (with septic systems) and and low-cost
simplified sewerage in countries like Brazil, Ecuador,
Peru India, Senegal, and Burkina Faso. World Bank financial
support is focused mainly on sanitation
and wastewater management related
infrastructure. To ensure the effectiveness, efficiency and
sustainability of these investments, they are complemented by
capacity building, communications programs and policy advice
focused on hygiene
promotion and supportive institutional and sector
environments.
The
World Bank supports countries to scale up sanitation and hygiene
services. Projects support policies that encourage and promote
sanitation and hygiene, capable institutions with clearly
defined roles and responsibilities, clear and effective
financing mechanisms and subsidy policies, and local community
structures that take the responsibility for operating and
maintaining local systems.
Sanitation access lags far behind access to safe water. The
World Bank is making a concerted effort to increase the quantity
and improve the impact of Bank-funded investments in basic
sanitation and hygiene through the establishment of a technical
assistance program to provide timely and qualified assistance on
demand to client countries in the preparation of sanitation
projects or components worldwide.
LATIN AMERICA:
Several countries in the Latin America and
Caribbean Region have achieved significant progress in effective
WSS service delivery, social inclusion, and good governance.
However, the poorest countries of the Region face common
challenges in meeting their Millennium Development Goals for
water and sanitation. To address the unique set of Latin
America's opportunities and challenges, WSP-LAC has designed a
specific strategy that seeks to balance the needs for
country-level intervention with the need to draw wider lessons
from other parts of the world. The strategy focuses on the
poorest countries of the Andean Region and Central America:
Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
For achieving effective delivery of sustainable
decentralized water and sanitation services in rural areas, WSP-LAC
has developed a strategy based on the following intervention
steams: building capacity for investments and services operation
at the decentralized level and supporting community-based water
supply and sanitation systems.
In small towns, WSP-LAC is working on the
development and promotion of alternative services management
models; in urban areas, it is providing policy support and
technical assistance to implement pro-poor urban sector reform,
as well as aiding the further development of appropriate
institutional and technical options (condominial
among them) to serve the poor; and finally WSP-LAC is supporting
the development of Sector Coordination Groups in the Region,
which are effective instruments in sharing knowledge and
influencing policies. As the Peruvian experience has shown, the
Sector Coordination Group is the connecting link among field
projects, NGOs, local governments, and cooperation agencies.
Based on inter-institutional communication and joint efforts,
the impact of this synergy has achieved important results for
the sector, for example the inclusion in the sector policy of
principles such as efficiency, economy, equity, priority and
sustainability as conditions to access financial support from
government and external aid organizations.
Latin America & Caribbean: water supply data
Most of the efforts to serve people with
improved water supply have been made in urban areas with
some 97 million more people served between 1990 and 2002.
These efforts have just been sufficient to keep up with the
increase of urban dwellers (+ 95 million).
Rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean have
seen some good progress: the percentage of people served with
improved water supply having risen by some 11% (+ 13 million).
Eduardo
Perez joined the World Bank in 2004 as Senior Water and
Sanitation consultant in the Energy and Water Department -
Sanitation, Hygiene and Wastewater Management Advisory Support
Service. From 1991 to 2004, he was Senior Project Manager at
CDM International for USAID-funded programs in water,
sanitation, and environmental health. He has over 30 years of
experience in water supply and sanitation, low-cost housing,
urban slum upgrading, municipal strengthening, and disaster
management -- beginning with his Peace Corps work in Honduras
and through subsequent positions at Volunteers in Technical
Assistance, Sister Cities International, INTERTECT, and CHF
International/Honduras. Over the course of his career, Mr.
Perez has worked closely with many other international
organizations, including the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB),
the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), World Health
Organization (WHO), United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the
United Nations Human Settlement Program (UN-HABITAT), and the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He earned his M.S.
in Engineering and Public Policy from Washington University and
his BS in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of
Technology.
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6.
New Publication -- "Water for All In Latin America: A
Daunting Task," by AIDIS-member Juan Alfaro
The author
of this book, Juan Alfaro, has been a member of AIDIS since
1954, when he was a founder of our Peruvian chapter.
In his early years with AIDIS, he served as President of that
chapter. Since those early years, he had a
distinguished career with the Inter American Bank, and
became active in the USA section of AIDIS. It is with
pride that we inform our fellow-members about a new book
authored by our long-standing colleague, Juan Alfaro.
The following information has been provided by the book's
publisher:
TRADITIONALLY,
water is
considered a gift to all from mother nature. People feel it
should be free-it is an assumed “right”. However, providing
consistently safe, reliable drinking water, in sustainable
quantity and quality to meet the demand implies a cost that
someone has to pay. In order to address properly the nature
of the “water for all” problem, it is necessary to perform a
comprehensive analysis of all the variables and alternatives
involved in the design of a sound water and/or wastewater
investment project, whether it is financed locally or
internationally, with or without private sector
participation.
WATER FOR ALL IN LATIN AMERICA: A daunting task
presents
the outline of all the components related to design,
evaluation, implementation and sustainability of investment
projects in the water and wastewater field in Latin America.
Environmental quality, institutional models, private sector
participation, financial, economic and political factors, in
addition to technical issues, are also discussed.
THE AUTHOR,
an US citizen, currently President of CEP International Inc,
a consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area, acquired
his expertise in the water field first in his country of
origin, Peru, second as Head of the Water Sector (Water,
Wastewater, Solid Waste and Air) at the Inter American
Development Bank (IADB), in Washington DC, for a period of
20 years; third, as an international consultant for the past
10 years working on, among other areas, on institutional
development, including private sector participation (PSP)
for water utilities in Latin America. Mr. Alfaro is an
environmental engineer, with an extensive and fruitful
career. In 1999, he wrote another book in Spanish, “Tres
Decadas de Saneamiento en Latin America”as a homage to the
40thanniversary of the IADB. This is his first book written
in English to better facilitate knowledge about the
potential of the Latin America market to the worldwide water
industry. Mr. Alfaro is formerly a spokesperson of the IADB
in national and international forums related to the sector.
He wrote numerous papers published by IADB and for
prestigious water magazines in USA as well as overseas. In
his country, Mr. Alfaro, combined his professional
activities with teaching at the Engineering National
University. He taught courses on Water Supply and
Sanitation, Hydrology and Economic Engineering.
Paperback:
188 pages
Publisher:
Drylongso Publishing (December 2005)
Language:
English
# ISBN:
0977263703
$29.95 +
s/h
Order
online at
Amazon.com
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7.
Getting
To Know The Board of Directors:
Eileen O’Neill
Eileen
joined USAIDIS (then known as AIDIS-USA) about 12 years ago,
and became a member of our Board of Directors about seven
years ago. She states that “I
find my participation in AIDIS provides an important
personal and professional connection with colleagues in the
hemisphere and find my participation as an association
volunteer extremely rewarding.” As a member of our Board,
she has provided good judgment based on extensive
experience, and has served as liaison with The Water
Environment Federation. Your editor remembers an
incident that is emblematic of her dedication, when she
recruited her school-age children to help stuff envelopes
when we needed to get out a mailing on short notice.
Eileen has
an international background – she was born in Germany of
Irish parents and raised in the UK.
Eileen has
more than 25 years of academic, consulting, and association
experience. This includes 15 years with The Water
Environment Federation (WEF), where she is now the Chief
Technical Officer. In this position she oversees WEF’s
Government Affairs, Public
Education, Books & Manuals, Magazines and Journals, and
Conference and Workshop Program Groups. Prior to this, she
has held a number of other positions with WEF including
Managing Director for Technical and Educational Services
(1997-2005), Director of WEF’s International Program
(1993-1997) and Director of WEF’s Industrial Program
(1991-1993).
Eileen has
been involved extensively in the international water field.
She has participated with WEF’s work with the United Nations
(UN) since 1993, including leading WEF’s application for
consultative status with the Economic and Social Council.
WEF has provided technical information to specific UN
program offices and provided independent peer review of a UN
Environmental Programme (UNEP) policy paper.
For six years, O’Neill directed WEF’s collaboration with the
US-Asia Environmental Partnership Program (US-AEP) to
promote the development of environmental professional
associations in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and
Thailand and to provide training and technical assistance in
the areas of water reuse; operation and management of
wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure; public
involvement and outreach; and development of certification
and continuing education programs for environmental
professionals. She also directed WEF’s seven-year
collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
to provide technical assistance and training in Central and
Eastern Europe. The focus included municipal environmental
infrastructure development, funding, and operation; source
water protection and watershed management; certification and
training; pollution prevention; biosolids management; and
public participation/stakeholder involvement.
Eileen has
a B.S. in Soil Science from the University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) and a Ph.D. in Soil Science from
the University of Aberdeen (UK) and undertook a postdoctoral
traineeship in Environmental Toxicology at the University of
Wisconsin at Madison. Her area of expertise is the fate and
transport of contaminants in the environment. She is the
author of more than 25 book chapters, magazine articles,
conference papers, and peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Eileen's
husband is from Germany and also works in the water
business, as an engineer with a water and wastewater
treatment company. They have three children – all girls –
17-year old twins and an elder daughter who is a junior at
the College of William and Mary studying Neuroscience. With
twins that are active both in Marching Band and with their
high school crew club, she professes that she has little
time for hobbies, but does add that she and her husband are
currently training to run the “Army Ten Miler” this fall in
DC. Never having participated in a race before, Eileen
reports she is focused on a modest goal of keeping up a pace
just fast enough to avoid being picked up by the recovery
bus.
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8.
UPCOMING USAIDIS EVENTS
Readers should
periodically check the EVENTS page of our website for updates
about future luncheon-meetings.
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9.
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE
If
you’re not yet a member, and what you’ve learned on this
website or elsewhere has sparked your interest, then
please join USAIDIS.
You’ll be able to benefit from our programs, and we’ll benefit
from your participation. We are seeking to increase our
membership in order to support an expanded program, and we
need you!
For
information about joining, please click
Membership to go to the
"Membership" part of this website, which provides additional
information, and includes a link to a membership application
form that can easily be submitted via the internet.
