Clean drinking water is available to no more than half of Asia’s population. Water is fundamental to the post-2015 development agenda. Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Mar 21 2017 (IPS)

In Asia, it likely will not be straightforward water wars.

Prolonged water scarcity might lead to security situations that are more nuanced, giving rise to a complex set of cascading but unpredictable consequences, with communities and nations reacting in ways that we have not seen in the past because climate change will alter the reliability of current water management systems and infrastructure, say experts.China plays an increasingly dominant role in South Asia’s water politics because it administers the Tibetan Autonomous Region; the Himalayan mountain range contains the largest amount of snow and ice after Antartica and the Arctic.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 said a water crisis is the most impactful risk over the next 10 years. The effects of rising populations in developing regions like Asia, alongside growing prosperity, place unsustainable pressure on resources and are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways – harming people, institutions and economies, and making water security an urgent political matter.

While the focus is currently on the potential for climate change to exacerbate water crises, with impacts including conflicts and a much greater flow of forced migration that is already on our doorsteps, a 2016 study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) warns Asia not to underestimate impact of industrial and population growth, including spiraling urban growth, on serious water shortages across a broad swath of Asia by 2050.

Asia’s water challenges escalate

To support a global population of 9.7 billion by 2050, food production needs to increase by 60 percent and water demand is projected to go up by 55 percent. But the horizon is challenging for developing regions, especially Asia, whose 3.4 billion population will need 100 percent more food – using the diminishing, non-substitute resource in a warming world said the Asian Water Development Outlook (AWDO) 2016, the latest regional water report card from the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

More than 1.4 billion people – or 42 percent of world’s total active workforce – are heavily water dependent, especially in agriculture-dominant Asia, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2016.

With erratic monsoons on which more than half of all agriculture in Asia is dependent, resorting to groundwater for irrigation, whose extraction is largely unmonitored, is already rampant. A staggering 70 percent of the world’s groundwater extraction is in Asia, with India, China and Pakistan the biggest consumers, estimates UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

By 2050, with a 30 percent increase in extraction, 86 percent of groundwater extracted in Asia will be by these three countries, finds the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Together India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal use 23 million pumps with an annual energy bill of 3.78 billion dollars for lifting water – an indicator of the critical demand for water, and to an extent of misgovernance and lack of water-saving technologies (AWDO 2016).

AWDO sounds alarm bells warning that we are on the verge of a water crisis, with limited knowledge on when we will tip the balance.

Analysts from the Leadership Group on Water Security in Asia say the start of future transboundary water conflicts will have less to do with the absolute scarcity of water and more to do with the rate of change in water availability.

Water, known as Blue Gold, provides a broad range of livelihoods to communities as in India’s Kerala state. Here coconut farmers ferry a boatload to sell at tourist spots. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

‘Resource nationalism’ already strong in water-stressed Asian neighbours

With just 30 days of buffer fresh water stock, Pakistan’s renewable internal freshwater resources per capita in 2014 measured a perilous 297 cubic metres, Bangladesh’s 660m³ India’s 1116m³ and China’s 2062m³. When annual water access falls below 1700m³ per person, an area is considered water-stressed and when 1000m³ is breached, it faces water scarcity.

ADB describes Asia as “the global hotspot for water insecurity.

By 2050 according to AWDO, 3.4 billion people – or the projected combined population of India, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2050 – making up 40 percent of the world population, could be living in water-stressed areas. In other words, the bulk of the population increase will be in countries already experiencing water shortages.

Underlying geo-political standpoints are slowly but perceptibly hardening in Himalayan Asia nations over shared river basins, even if not intensifying as yet, seen in the latest instances last year. They are, as water conflict analysts predict, spurts of bilateral tension that might or might not suddenly escalate to conflict, the scale of which cannot be predicted. The following, a latest instance, is a pointer to future scenarios of geographical interdependencies that riparian nations can either reduce by sensible hydro-politics or escalate differences by contestations.

There was alarm in Pakistan when Indian Prime Minister took a stand in September last year to review the 57-year-old Indus Water Treaty between the two South Asian neighbours. India was retaliating against a purportedly Pakistan terrorist attack on an Indian army base at Uri in Kashmir that killed 18 soldiers.

By co-incidence or design (several Indian analysts think it is the latter), at the very same time China blocked a tributary of the Yarlung Tsangpo River which is the upper course of the Brahmaputra in India, as part of the construction of its 740-million-dollar Lalho hydro project in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The Yarlung Tsangpo River originates in the Himalayan ranges, and is called the Brahmaputra as it flows down into India’s Arunachal Pradesh state bordering Tibet and further into Bangladesh.

China’s action caused India alarm on two counts. Some analysts believed Beijing was trying to encourage Dhaka to take up a defensive stand against India over sharing of Brahmaputra waters, thereby destabilizing India-Bangladesh’s cordial ally status in the region.

The second possibility analysts proffered is an alarming and fairly new military risk. River water, when dammed, can be intentionally used as a weapon of destruction during war.

Pakistan had earlier raised the same security concern, that India may exercise a strategic advantage during war by regulating the two major dams on rivers that flow through Kashmir into Pakistan. Indian experts say China is more likely than India to take this recourse and will use the river water as a bargaining chip in diplomatic negotiations.

South Asia as a region is prone to conflict between nations, between non-state actors and the state. Its history of territorial issues, religious and ethnic differences makes it more volatile than most other regions. Historically China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have had territorial wars between them. The  wary and increasingly competitive outlook of their relationships makes technology-grounded and objective discussions over the erupting water disputes difficult.

China already plays an increasingly dominant role in South Asia’s water politics because it administers the Tibetian Autonomous Region with the Tibetan Plateau, around which the Himalayan mountain range contains the largest amount of snow and ice after Antartica and the Arctic. The glacier-fed rivers that emanate from this ‘water tower’ are shared across borders by 40 percent of world population, guaranteeing food, water and energy security to millions of people and nurturing biodiverse ecosystems downstream.

The largest three trans-boundary basins in the region – in terms of area, population, water resources, irrigation and hydropower potential – are the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra.

Both India and China have embarked on massive hydropower energy generation, China for industrialization and India to provide for its population, which will be the world’s largest by 2022.

With growing food and energy needs, broad estimates suggest that more than half of the world’s large rivers are dammed. Dams have enormous benefits, but without comprehensive water-sharing treaties, lower riparian states are disadvantaged and this could turn critical in future.

While there are river-water sharing treaties between India and Pakistan, and with Bangladesh, there is none with China except a hydrological data sharing collaboration.

Security threats emerge when it becomes difficult to solve competition over scarce natural resources by cooperation. Failure may result in violent conflicts. A ‘zero-sum’ situation is reached, when violence is seen as the only option to secure use of the resource, says a 2016 report by the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change.

When drivers in Asia, like population growth, the need for economic growth, poverty reduction, energy needs, the impact of high rate of urbanization and changing lifestyles, confront resource scarcity, it could bring a zero-sum situation sooner than anticipated.

Excerpt:

Women collecting water from a deep tube well in Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Credit: A.S.M. Shafiqur Rahman/IPS

By Mahfuzur Rahman
DHAKA, Dec 28 2016 (IPS)

Experts at Bangladesh’s National Water Convention 2016 in Dhaka urged the sustainable management and conservation of water as the country braces for a water crisis due to wastage, river pollution, declining groundwater tables and intrusion of salinity.

Bangladesh’s Water Resources Minister Anisul Islam Mahmud told the event there is no alternative to protecting the country’s water bodies and rivers to ensure sustainable management of water resources as envisaged in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.

A United Nations initiative, the SDGs are a set of 17 aspirational “Global Goals” with 169 targets relating to poverty and hunger, the environment and other core issues related to sustainable human development.

“We have many rivers and canals but all are being encroached on, limiting the water conservation scope…we must protect these water bodies to conserve water,” he told the inaugural session of the conference in the capital.

The Palli Karma-Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), a public sector apex body, Bangladesh Unnayan Parishad (BUP), a non-profit organisation devoted to the promotion of basic as well as action research on socioeconomic development, and NGO Forum, the apex networking and service delivery body of NGOs, jointly organized the Dec. 27-28 two-day convention titled Water Convention 2016: Sustainable Water Regime in Bangladesh: Availability, Management and Access’.

Minister Mahmud said Bangladesh receives huge amounts of water during the rainy season but 80 percent of it ultimately washes down into the Bay of Bengal, while 20 percent remains available for the rest of the year.

“If this water can be stored, Bangladesh is unlikely to face water scarcity during the dry season,” he said.

Mahmud noted that Bangladesh began investing in flood control and irrigation in the 1970s, and river management in the early 1980s, marking a retreat from its previous approach. “Now the extensive focus is there on river management,” he added.

About the prevailing water challenges, Mahmud said, “To meet our water demand, we’re extracting groundwater, triggering an arsenic problem here…but water availability and its management is very important. We’re polluting water every day because we’re not aware of it.”

According to documents provided at the workshop, some 36 million people are at risk of arsenic exposure in Bangladesh’s 61 districts with excessive arsenic-contaminated water.

Mahmud also said recurring floods and riverbank erosion and declining water flow in trans-boundary rivers cause a huge drop in the water level of the country’s drought-prone zones.

Addressing the event, PKSF chairman Prof. Dr Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad said it is important for Bangladesh to focus on water management to achieve the SDGs as there is also a link between poverty and water availability.

Stressing the importance of having a coordinated water management policy in place, Dr. Kholiquzzaman said Bangladesh can best utilise its river routes as those are cheap for goods and passenger transportation.

The prominent economist said poor people are most affected when there is a water crisis as it decimates crops.

Depicting a dismal global scenario of water availability, he mentioned that the earth’s total water volume is about 1,386 cubic kilometres in diameter, of which only 2.5 percent is freshwater.

“But only 0.76 percent of the total water volume which is freshwater is useable since over 68 percent freshwater is locked up in ice and glaciers,” he added.

According to him, the per capita availability of water in Bangladesh is 7,568 cubic metres and just 150-200 cubic metres in its neighbouring countries.

“So the question may arise why Bangladesh faces a scarcity of water. It’s because the country has a plenty of water during monsoon, but a very little water during dry season,” he said.

India’s many mighty rivers like the Ganges and Indus not only irrigate vast tracts of farmland and provide life-sustaining resources to millions, they also form the basis of India’s hydropower plans for the coming decade. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, India, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

As the United Nations closes its chapter on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and charts a new plan of action under the framework of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), India – a country of 1.2 billion people – is confronting its resource challenges.

One of the country’s primary concerns is how to provide its citizens equal access to fresh, clean water while also juggling the vast energy needs of its population and many industries.

India Confronts its Water Woes as it Moves from MDGs to SDGs from IPS News on Vimeo.

Refugees dig for water in a dried-up watering hole in Jamam camp, in South Sudan's Upper Nile state. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 2 2013 (IPS)

When the General Assembly declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation (IYWC) three years ago, the U.N.’s highest policy-making body was conscious of the perennial conflicts triggered by competition over one of the world’s most critical finite resources.

Current and past water conflicts and marine disputes have included confrontations between Israel and Jordan, India and Pakistan, Egypt and Ethiopia, Palestine and Israel, and Bolivia, Peru and Chile.

Picking up the cue from the United Nations, the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) is focusing its weeklong meeting this year on the theme “Water Cooperation – Building Partnerships.”

The 23rd annual meeting in the Swedish capital, attended by over 2,500 delegates, is due to conclude Friday.

Striking a more optimistic note, SIWI’s Executive Director Torgny Holmgren told IPS historically, water has been a source of cooperation more often than not. Over the past 50 years, he noted, there has been almost 2,000 interactions on transboundary basins of which only seven have involved violence and 70 percent have been cooperative.

“I think the future situation depends very much on our ability to deal with the water demand challenge,” said Holmgren, a former ambassador and head of the Department for Development Policy at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

“If we are able to increase water productivity so that we can free up water resources for protecting our environment, thereby ensuring the sustainability of the supply, and allowing for new users and uses, it will be easy to cooperate,” he said. “If we aren’t able to manage demand, and water management becomes more of a zero-sum exercise, avoiding conflict will be a challenge.”

Irina Bokova, director-general of the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the lead U.N. agency which will oversee IWYC, points out that there are numerous examples in which transboundary waters have proved to be a source of cooperation rather than conflict.

Nearly 450 agreements on international waters were signed between 1820 and 2007. And over 90 international water agreements were drawn up to help manage shared water basins on the African continent, she said in an interview with IPS last March.

According to the London-based WaterAid, nearly 768 million people in the world live without safe water, roughly one in eight people. Some 2.5 billion others live without access to sanitation, about 39 percent of the world’s population.

The U.S. intelligence community has already portrayed a grim scenario for the foreseeable future: ethnic conflicts, regional tensions, political instability and even mass killings.

During the next 10 years, “many countries important to the United States will almost certainly experience water problems – shortages, poor water quality, or floods – that will contribute to the risk of instability and state failure, and increased regional tensions,” stated a National Intelligence Estimate released last year.

In a report released Monday, SIWI says in a world where the population is growing fast and the demand for freshwater is growing along with it, “the fact that we all depend on the same finite water resources is becoming impossible to ignore.

“Cooperation between sectors is fundamental if we are to successfully share and manage our most precious resource,” the group says.

The water problem is not something that can be solved only by experts, says the report titled “Cooperation for a Water Wise World: Partnerships for Sustainable Development.”

“We need to cooperate with actors outside the water sector, to foster collaboration between the various decision-making institutions, between the private, public and civic sectors as well as between actors who work in research, policy and practice,” it says.

“Only through sound and forward-looking partnerships can we achieve a water wise world,” Holmgren noted.

Addressing delegates Monday, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said in a world of population growth and pressures on water resources within and among nations, sound and fair water management “is a huge task and a clear imperative for all of us. And we have no time to waste.”

The 2015 deadline for the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is rapidly approaching. And there is good news in some areas, he said. Since the adoption of the MDGs in the year 2000, global poverty rates have been reduced by half. Two hundred million slum dwellers live better lives. School enrolment rates have increased dramatically.

“And last year we were able to announce that the world had reached the target for access to improved sources of water,” Eliasson said.

But water quality to a large degree still fails to meet basic World Health Organization (WHO) standards, he cautioned.

One of the main factors that negatively affects water quality is the lack of sanitation. The sanitation target is among the most lagging of the MDG Goals, with more than 2.5 billion people around the world without adequate sanitation – more than one-third of humanity, said Eliasson.

Asked if water and sanitation should stand alone as one of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) currently under discussion as part of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda, Holmgren told IPS, “I think we need a dedicated water SDG that stresses both the productive and protective roles of water resources management and the sustainable of water and sanitation.”

In addition, he said, the intimate connections between water, food, energy, security, biodiversity, and other issues must be spelled out, either in the water goal or in other goals.

Irina Bokova, Director General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 2013 (IPS)

What has education, science and culture to do with one of the world’s most scarce and finite resources?

Plenty, says the United Nations, which has designated the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as the lead agency to promote the 2013International Year of Water Cooperation (IYWC).

Asked if water is more an area for potential conflicts or an area for mutual cooperation, UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova told IPS, “Water acts as a unifier.”

She said the historical record shows that water disputes do get resolved, even among bitter enemies, and even as conflicts drag out over other issues.

“Some of the most vociferous enemies around the world have negotiated water agreements or are in the process of doing so,” said Bokova, a former foreign minister of Bulgaria, who studied at the University of Maryland and at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

In an interview with IPS, she said “it is often said that water can be a source of conflict.

“But at UNESCO, we are guided by the opposite idea – we want to see water as a tremendous resource for cooperation, for exchange and joint work between States and societies,” said Bokova, the first woman to head UNESCO, and who is expected to run for a second four-year term, come October.

According to the United Nations, the IYWC will highlight “the history of successful water cooperation initiatives, as well as identify burning issues on water education, water diplomacy, trans-boundary water management, financing cooperation, national/international legal frameworks, and the linkages with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”

Bokova said, “We need a new vision that marries social equity, environmental protection and sustainable economic development as part of a single agenda for a more sustainable world.”

She said UNESCO strongly believes that water must lie at the heart of this vision, and water diplomacy is an essential tool of ‘soft power’ for a more peaceful world.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are the specific areas of cooperation between, and among, countries now?

A: The Mekong Committee has functioned since 1957, exchanging data throughout the Vietnam War. Secret “picnic table” talks have been held between Israel and Jordan since the unsuccessful Johnston negotiations of 1953 to 1955, even as these riparians until only recently were in a legal state of war.

The Indus River Commission survived through two wars between India and Pakistan. And all ten Nile riparians are currently involved in negotiations over cooperative development of the basin.

There are numerous examples where trans-boundary waters have proved to be a source of cooperation rather than conflict. Nearly 450 agreements on international waters were signed between 1820 and 2007. And over 90 international water agreements were drawn up to help manage shared water basins on the African continent.

Q: Are the U.N.’s efforts at “water cooperation” feasible against the backdrop of water-sharing conflicts between India-Pakistan? Israel-Jordan? Palestine-Israel?

A: The role of the United Nations is to offer a platform for dialogue and communication through the tools that are available to the system. Each agency facilitates cooperation from a specific angle of intervention.

UNESCO, for example, uses education and science as a means to intervene in a situation where cooperation needs to be established or enhanced. Two unique programmes provide the organisation’s member states with the scientific backbone needed for any water management issue at any level – from the local to the national, regional and international levels.

Firstly, the International Hydrological Programme (IHP) is the only intergovernmental scientific cooperative programme that aims at helping member states manage their water resources and address the needs of their peoples through science and education.

And, secondly, he World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP) which provides invaluable data and regular assessments of the planet’s water resources, without which decision makers cannot move forward with their decisions making processes.

Q: Any concrete examples?

A: Example 1: UNESCO’s Potential Conflict to Cooperation Potential (PCCP) programme, which is an associated programme of both IHP and WWAP, facilitates multi-level and interdisciplinary dialogue to foster peace, cooperation and development by building capacity to manage trans-boundary water resources.

For example, research on Lake Titicaca involved stakeholders from both Bolivia and Peru. A joint document was prepared outlining the status of conflict and cooperation in this trans-boundary water body.

In 1992, Bolivia and Peru created the Bi-national Autonomous Authority of Lake Titicaca recognising the importance of the joint management of the lake.

The PCCP programme worked to build on this cooperative will and to facilitate a joint vision common to all stakeholders through a joint case study providing a forum for cooperative action, and a joint management strategy while at the same time increasing knowledge of the shared water body.

Example 2: Arab countries are cooperating on the management of shared water resources through various intergovernmental fora.

These include the Arab Ministerial Water Council, which adopted the Arab Strategy for Water Security in the Arab Region to meet the challenges and the future needs of sustainable development (2010-2030).

The strategy highlights the importance of regional cooperation among Arab states for the management of shared water resources, the protection of Arab water rights, and the improvement of access to water supply and sanitation services.

Regional cooperation at the basin level is also being pursued to improve the management of shared surface and groundwater resources by adopting a common vision and the establishment of an inventory of shared surface and groundwater resources in the Western Asia subregion, which is being prepared by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA).

Excerpt:

In rural Sri Lanka women are tasked with fetching and carrying water for the entire household, sometimes walking miles with pots and bottles balanced on their heads. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
POLONNARUWA, Sri Lanka, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

During the dry season, when dirt roads are cracked from the relentless heat, the sight of women walking miles, balancing pots of water on their heads, is common in rural Sri Lanka.

While the men tend to paddy fields, the women are left with the arduous task of collecting water for household use. They account for every drop of water consumed, utilised or wasted – making them crucial players in rural water projects.

Talpothta is a typical agricultural village in Sri Lanka’s dry zone, whose life cycle is completely dependent on the rainfall that has become extremely erratic in the last few years.

In 2006, the village was chosen as one of the beneficiaries of a 263-million-dollar Asian Development Bank (ADB) project that set out to provide safe drinking water to 900,000 people in Sri Lanka’s north-central and eastern provinces.

But unlike many other development projects in the country, this is led primarily by women, who comprise an overwhelming majority of the village community.

From the initial planning stages, village women were inducted into the project’s long-term implementation plans, which included installing a community-run water storage tank and mapping out a distribution network to link the entire village to the water supply.

The project’s community leaders advise the roughly 200 village water users, check metres, collect payments and, most importantly, decide when and how to limit the water supply when the dry season sets in. Members also visit households regularly and keep close tabs on usage.

Sheila Herath, a member of the group of local leaders, says women play a critical role in this project.

“The woman in the household is the person who will know how much water is used for what. So we know how much is needed and how much is excess,” she said.

The ADB project planners knew this from experience, not only in Sri Lanka but in other parts of rural South Asia, officials told IPS, adding that 50 percent of participants at planning meetings and at least 25 percent of the officials from the government Water Board were women.

According to Attanayake Mudiyanse Senevirathana, a public official in the north-central town of Polonnaruwa working on improving access to safe water, women have traditionally played the role of ‘water bearer’.

“This is still the case,” he told IPS, adding, “Women also feel they gain more by the success of such projects.”

Thanks to the new water project, women in Talpothta say they find themselves with a lot more free time – something that most rural women can only dream of.

Forty-five-year-old Liyadurige Siriyawathi has returned to a childhood hobby that she gave up when she got married two decades ago – making sketches. She now earns about 100 dollars a month from the sales of these drawings.

Others are engaged in home gardening or say that they now have more time for themselves or for the children.

Kusum Athukorale, who heads the Network of Women Water Professionals in Sri Lanka, told IPS that one sixth of the island’s water supply is derived from rural community projects. Their success depends on women’s participation at every level, she stressed.

“They are the ones who know where the water sources are, how much is needed. They the ones who walk miles to gather water when drought sets in.”

Athukorale calls women the “foot soldiers of climate change adaptation” because of their hands-on knowledge of how natural resources are being used in households.

A recent ADB report entitled ‘Gender and Urban Poverty in South Asia’ found that women’s role in water management was crucial throughout the region.

“Health surveys conducted in 45 developing countries during 2005–2008 showed that globally, women bear the largest burden as primary collectors of water in 64 percent of households, compared with 24 percent of households for men, four percent for boys, and eight percent for girls,” the report stated.

The report warned that women, especially those from poor communities, were at risk of suffering more due to lack of access to safe water “as they are the primary users, providers, and managers of water in households and are responsible for household hygiene.”

The report detailed projects in Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, and Nepal similar to the Talpothta water scheme, where women played a crucial role in ensuring success.

A women’s group in the village of Ramnagara, a town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, was responsible for lobbying local authorities and a non-governmental group to establish pipes close to their homes. Like in rural Sri Lanka, the new pipes freed up time the women would otherwise have spent searching for water.

“Women now use the time saved to participate in group activities and explore other livelihood options,” the ADB report said.

“There is an accumulation of evidence to show that if we are able to (appoint) women as the decision makers for a project on the ground, the success rate goes up almost instantly,” Naoko Ishii, chairperson of the Washington-based Global Environment Facility (GEF), a public fund that assists in projects related to sustainable development, told IPS.

Ishii, who served as Japan’s deputy finance minister and as country head for the World Bank in Sri Lanka before taking up the GEF top post, credits women’s sense of discipline as a key factor in their pivotal role, especially in rural Asia and Africa.

“When women are in charge of a micro finance project, the repayment ratio is much higher,” she told IPS.