14:12 Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)

I will now outline some of the things for which WaterAid is calling, before finishing with a few questions for the Minister. As we know, world leaders committed to reach everyone, everywhere with safe water and sanitation by 2030. That is a wide-ranging goal, with eight objectives, and if they are met that should be a good and helpful step forward. WaterAid, however, has said that Governments must bring about a dramatic and long-term increase in public and private financing for water, sanitation and hygiene to achieve strong, national systems so that there is universal access. Private and public sectors need to co-operate effectively to achieve that universal access. An integrated approach could ensure that improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene services is embedded in plans, policies and programmes on health, nutrition, education, gender equality and employment. Last but not least, pledges made at the 2015 Paris climate summit must be implemented, because they are about the long-term sustainability of water supplies.

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14:38 Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)

In Scotland, the SNP-led Government are also committed to boosting water and sanitation projects in Africa, through their climate justice fund. In December 2015, Nicola Sturgeon announced £12 million of funding to help mitigate the effects of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable populations. That was a doubling of the climate justice fund. The head of Oxfam Scotland, Jamie Livingstone, said that

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14:54 Diane Abbott (Labour)

We know that Ministers have some excellent programmes in Somalia, but immediate help is needed, both to provide water, food and shelter and to make regions such as Somalia resilient to the increasing incidence of drought, which means more boreholes, better irrigation and better methods of storing rainwater. We saw flash floods when we left British Somaliland, but the water runs off the earth and into the rivers. Clean water is an issue, but so is an absolute lack of water. If the Minister is unable to answer now, will he write on what is being done to help the people of Somalia to deal with the incidence of drought that they are enduring now and on what is being done to help them to be resilient? With climate change, such regions of the world, which once might have seen drought every seven years or every decade, are seeing drought year after year. They need help in both the short term and the medium term to become resilient to drought.

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15:03 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Nick Hurd)

In Ethiopia, we are working hard to support the Government to reach 31 million people with sustainable water and sanitation services. That includes ensuring that the services are resilient to future threats from climate change, because as many Members will know, the sustainability of such services is critical.

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