This intersection in the Thematic Content matrix of the Forum perhaps is generating great expectations and, at the same time, skepticism.

According to Cristobal Jaime Jaquez, the Director of Mexico’s National Water Commission, “the per capita availability of water is diminishing, and yet we are not taking action or making the necessary investments to face this problem. Our infrastructures are not sufficient, our services do not reach the entire population, and we lack commitment in devoting the necessary resources to resolve this problem. That is why we must emerge from the 4th World Water Forum with very clear ideas on what we must do to face a problem that will otherwise worsen very soon”.

Loïc Fauchon, acting President of the World Water Council, says that the right to water, the access to it, everywhere, for a long time and quickly is the real challenge that the international community must face up, and one condition is to assure financing for water and sanitation infrastructures to build, but also to manage. “It is everybody’s money for everybody.”

How can we finance local initiatives in order to face the challenges posed by water and sanitation?

According to Daniel Zimmer, Executive Director of the World Water Council, after the 3rd World Water Forum that took place in Kyoto in 2003, what many specialists had been saying for some time became very clear to everybody else: we are not financing water initiatives at the local level. This conclusion was partly sustained in “Financing Water for All, the Report of the World Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure”, chaired by Michel Camdessus.

“But at the same time —says Zimmer— the panel’s report concluded that the most feasible opportunity for improving the water infrastructure in most countries was through local initiative financing, since there are competitive people willing to take charge of the responsibility, and pre-existing infrastructures that allow a certain potential for recovering costs.”

On the other hand, for the World Bank’s expert, Abel Mejia Betancourt, “new models will not be invented during the 4th World Water Forum, but proposals will be introduced to allow financing of water infrastructures in developing countries”.

According to Mejia, the bank’s Director of Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office, it is a fact that the flow of private financing for infrastructure projects —especially those dealing with water services and sanitation— has been diminishing and will continue to do so, he said, because “there is less interest in investing in developing countries that have not met the expectations set 10 years ago.”

Unfortunately, he added, “in the past years the flow of resources from international institutions for financing water projects has also diminished noticeably.”

Mejia expects that “very clear ideas on how to increase financing will emerge from the Forum, basically through better assignment of investment risks, so that both public and private sectors assume risks that they are better equiped to face and manage at the lowest possible cost. In this Forum —he says— many analyses will emerge relating to risk management, and how they can eventually result in increasing the volume of investment”.

The 4th World Water Forum will be an opportunity for analyzing concrete examples of what has been done recently in matters of local initiative financing like, for instance, a guarantee management scheme devised by the World Bank for a French Bank, and from both institutions to the municipality of Tlalnepantla in Mexico, which succeeded in increasing the credit rating of the municipal government, allowing it to issue bonds for financing local water and sanitation infrastructure. These bonds comply with legal prerequisites that allow pension funds in Mexico —which would otherwise channel their resources to financial markets overseas— to invest in them.

The previous example demonstrates how local action, under an innovative financing model, can foster sustainable and integral development, transcending the solution of water and sanitation requirements of a community by introducing previously unavailable options for productively and locally investing the retirement fund savings of millions of Mexican workers.