Paper presented by Patrick Moriarty and John Butterworth

Around the world, hundreds of millions of men, women and children live in extreme poverty. Their poverty is multi-faceted: besides lacking money, they have limited access to education, suffer from poor health, have little political weight, and are vulnerable to all manner of external shocks like droughts and economic crises. In addition they have access to very limited resources, natural, physical or financial: in particular they typically suffer from limited access to water – both of safe quality and adequate quantity. A great many of these poor men and women, in urban, rural and peri-urban settings base their livelihoods on ‘informal activities’ – small-scale cropping, livestock keeping, agro-processing and other micro-enterprises. In many of these activities an adequate water supply is a crucial enabling resource: as a resource used in or necessary for the activity itself; as a provider of time (by reducing time spent collecting water); or as a key element in improved health that enables people to do work. Taken together then, water
supplies provided to households, and particularly the poorest (and women, who are found disproportionately amongst the poorest), have a huge potential to impact on poverty. This symposium is about such water supplies, about how to provide them and how to ensure that their potential to impact on poverty can be fully realised. [authors abstract]