ABSTRACT
Water is the precondition for human life. As a shared resource it is at the core of human interdependence, both within and between countries. Thus, ensuring access to clean and sufficient water for all, including through comprehensive laws and policies regulating the use and management of water, must be a priority of any government authority involved in the development or implementation of water management systems. The world has never been further away from universal access to water. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF ), in 2004 over one billion people globally were without access to improved water supply (which amounts to one human being out of six).1 Though this number dropped to 884 million by 2006,2 the challenge remains grave. In 2004, there were over four billion cases of diarrhoea which caused 1.8 million deaths, mostly among children under five.3
While the need to address this situation has been widely recognized, the attempts of the international community to solve the problem have not gone far enough. Emblematic of this, the water-related Millennium Development Goals (MDG) do not contribute to the realization of access to water for everyone, but only aim to halve the number of people without access to water by 2025.4
