UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Administrator Samantha Power at the Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Hi everyone. Thank you, Laura [Kohler], Congressman [Darin] LaHood, and Congresswoman [Grace] Meng, thanking all of you – for your leadership, for bringing us to this place, for bringing us together, for putting this issue on people’s radar. There’s a lot going on. It’s easy to prioritize the urgent, the here and now, over the important. And if you don’t prioritize the important, the urgent keeps coming, and coming, and coming – and this is a great example of that.

Laura, just thanks for Kohler’s dedication to save water and your personal commitment to sanitation for all. Private sector champions are absolutely crucial in the effort to bring about global water security. And to be honest with you, members of the USAID team here, we at USAID are now trying every development area to think of private sector partnership as a design feature of everything that we do. We know that no matter how generous taxpayers or Members of Congress are, we have to, on behalf of our environmental agenda. World needs are outpacing even the most generous budgets we can generate. But more than that, it is not just about needing resources, needing to leverage our resources, but it is also that the private sector brings solutions. They bring intellectual capital and expertise. And if we can harness that, and bring private sector ingenuity into this space in earnest, that’s going to be a huge deal.

So, I’m really, really grateful to be here. I join others, again, in thanking Millennium Water Alliance, WaterAid, and the International Association for Plumbing and Mechanical Officials for hosting this event, and for their long-standing partnership with USAID.

Everyone here, again, has worked tirelessly to expand support for this critical work. Like others, I have to single out Congressman Earl Blumenauer – a longtime champion of clean water and sanitation. He’s embarking on a well-deserved retirement after twenty-seven years, and whose famous family fruitcake I am hoping to get ahold of before he leaves town.

Congressman LaHood, it’s a rite of passage in Illinois to be a water guy. So, you’ve picked up the mantle and we are so grateful that these efforts have been, as you said, bipartisan.

I want to thank Congresswoman Meng. I know that I’m going to be appearing before one or more of your committees shortly. The first question will always be about WASH. So, I have to do my murderboards to be prepared for whatever your WASH line of questioning is, but doing that for every witness, always making it center stage is a central feature of your leadership.

Senator [Dick] Durbin, of course, is not here. You have heard from him already, but he was so instrumental in passing this act ten years ago.

And of course, Patti Simon, who we’ll be hearing from shortly, who has been so instrumental in carrying forward this agenda on behalf of such an impactful Senator, Senator Paul Simon.

Some of you may know that during his tenure up here on Capitol Hill, Paul Simon traveled with then-Senator Harry Reid to Uzbekistan, where he visited remnants of the Aral Sea. He never forgot what he saw. The wide expanse of dry land that should have been filled with sapphire blue. The boats still moored, sitting utterly uselessly and strangely in what had become a desert. The infants in health clinics suffering from liver disease, from anemia, from rickets.

The devastation of the Aral Sea took with it a thriving fishing economy. Its remaining water became increasingly saline, destroying once-successful farms. And in the decades that followed, and I was in the region not long ago, facing rising poverty and disease, tens of thousands of people – especially young people – fleeing because they could no longer imagine livelihoods in the broad region of the Aral Sea.

To Paul Simon, the Aral Sea was a microcosm of what awaited humanity at large without rapid action – what he called a “looming, waterless storm,” which is a really profound way of putting it, with rising levels of the disease and displacement, of growing instability at home and abroad.

As you have heard, of course, today that storm is encroaching as more than three billion people live in water stressed areas, and one in four can’t wash their hands with soap and water. The crisis poses a real and present danger to American interests, because global water shortages have catastrophic effects on global stability, as seen in so many parts of the world.

To start, the water crisis is a rapidly growing cause of global migration. The United Nations estimates close to 700 million people will be displaced by water shortages – not by 2050, but by the end of this decade.

Shortages of water – life’s most essential and irreplaceable building block arguably – are also increasingly triggering conflict. From 2010 to 2019, water was a trigger for almost 300 conflicts across the world. And that was a 400 percent increase from the previous decade. We’ve almost hit the same number – an entire decade’s worth of water-related conflicts – in just the last three years. Think about that as an omen of the future where countries go to war – not to seize power or land, but to quench thirst. Think about that.

That is why Senator Simon was a lifelong advocate on the Hill and beyond for clean water and sanitation. And eventually, he brought everyone else on board, as he was skilled at doing. The Water for the World Act in 2014 was shepherded past both Houses. The vote was unanimous in both Houses – almost unheard of, it’s fair to say, in the last decade, let alone for a foreign aid bill.

And look what that bipartisan, enduring support has helped accomplish on the ground. Here I would just offer you a couple examples.

In the Philippines beach town of Puerto Princesa City, where ground water resources have been heavily degraded and renewable river water was expensive to treat, USAID created a financing facility that connected private investors to local water service providers in need of capital. These private loans helped finance wastewater treatment projects, while also expanding local water supply by purifying and distributing river water.

In 2007, a third of Puerto Princesa residents had access to clean water. Today, more than 80 percent do. Again, that public-private partnerships bring access to capital for utilities and other public goods, ensuring they can access capital and those kinds of partnership facilitated – that is the way of the future.

When Kenya’s recent drought sparked a spike in water-related conflicts among rural farmers, as it tends to do, Kenya faced the challenge of more efficiently delivering scarce water resources to hard-to-reach communities. USAID, working again with private companies and nonprofit organizations, helped upgrade more than one hundred water systems across the country and establish real-time monitoring and remote sensors to detect failing pipes and boreholes from hundreds of miles away. In total, this partnership helped provide fresh water for more than 460,000 people in drought-prone areas, as well as the crops and livestock that helped feed and support entire communities.

All told, since this incredible Water for the World Act became law, USAID has helped 42 million people access clean water, and 38 million people access sanitation services.

Now of course, is not the time to rest. Water shortages, as we discussed, are an even bigger challenge as extreme weather and heat affect so many communities that actually had not to worry about water scarcity so much in the past.

All of us, here up on Capitol Hill and beyond, have to reaffirm our commitment to promoting global water security, helping every person realize that universal right to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene.

This goal united all of us once before. We can honor Senator Simon’s memory and to make the world more humane, more dignified, and more stable by uniting behind it once again.

Thank you so much for your courageous effort. Thank you.