DISTINGUISHED GUESTS,
LADIES AND GENTLEMAN,
It gives me great pleasure and honor to welcome you all on this occasion as we celebrate the 19th World Water Day. The importance of water in our daily lives is of course unquestionable and your attendance presence is indeed a vivid sign of your commitment to the cause of sustainable water resources management for human development.
The political commitment of our country to addressing water resources management challenges is clear as elaborated in the national Policy and its strategic plan we are officially launching today.
No doubt, water related issues are emerging as one of the most challenging national and trans-boundary trends of our time.
The World Water Day is held annually on the 22nd March as a way of focusing attention on the importance of water and advocating for the sustainable management of water resources. As you all know, this year , emphasis is on the nexus between Water and Food Security.
The purpose is to highlights the significance of water in food production. It is established that the number of the world population to feed will increase from 7 billion today to 9 billion in year 2050.
Moreover statistics suggest that each of us drinks from 2 to 4 litres of water every day, however most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: by way of illustration, producing 1 kilo of beef consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ’drinks up’ 1,500 litres.
For long time our abundant water resources have been taken for granted, but water is finite and becoming scarce, and its demand increases further, year after year.
With a billion people on our planet living in chronic hunger conditions and the increasing water stress, mainly due to climate change, ensuring access to nutritious for everyone calls for a series of actions to be consistently upheld including the following:
- Produce more food of higher quality , with less water utilized
- Consume less water- intensive products
- Minimize the unacceptable food and related water wastage whereby 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitely lost.
Regarding Rwanda, population growth and the drive for fast socioeconomic development exert extra pressure on the water resources and our country will need to pay greater attention to effective water resource management.
In fact
• With the annual population growth rate of about 3%, water requirements for the population will of course also rise. And as we progress toward our Vision 2020 target of becoming a middle-income country, where urbanization will intensify, average daily water consumption per person is expected to double, from about 50 liters per day to 100 liters.
• Likewise, our plans for industrial development will place significant new demands on our water resources. The tea and coffee industries are already significant consumers of water resources, and as we seek to achieve our targets in other agro-processing industries, energy production (particularly hydro-power), mining, etc., we may be confronted with difficult choices about how to allocate increasingly scarce water resources.
Elaboration of our Water Policy and Strategy was effected in anticipation of those predictable challenges. We have opted for an approach that recognizes water as a finite resource and which promotes the coordinated management of water, land, and related resources in order to maximize the economic and social welfare without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems. In other words we are proposing the approach of Integrated Water Resources Management.
The challenges our country is facing in Water Resources are simply too complex for individual institutions to tackle alone. We need the involvement of everybody, government institutions, non-governmental organizations, private sector, and individuals to work together towards improving appropriate water resources management to support national development.
We require significant investments in institutions and infrastructure.
We need to cross the sectoral boundaries that exist in our institutional arrangements. It is essential that our policies, our strategies, institutional and legal frameworks are well coordinated and harmonized in order to optimize and ensure optimum benefit of using our resource.
As the Government embarks on the process of developing the next phase of the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS II), I wish to call upon all of us that are involved in the process to seriously give due consideration to the importance of preserving our water in meeting our various development objectives.
I would like to conclude by stating again that water is vital, as the “common thread that links all aspects of human development”. It is now my duty and pleasure to launch the National Policy on Water Resources Management and its strategic Plan in the coming five years.
I thank you.
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