Stockholm World Water Week: How Water Utilities Respond in Crisis and Conflict

Aug 27, 2018 | World Bank Group and UN Children’s Fund
Stockholm, Sweden
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The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region has experienced an upsurge of political unrest and conflict over the past decade. Urban water service providers during conflict confront these impacts directly – including the loss of staff and customers, the destruction of assets, and protracted energy shortages. Other utilities, while out of active conflict, are suffering from the impact of burgeoning urban populations of displaced people and refugees. The effects of conflict compound the utilities’ existing conditions of low cost recovery, increasing water scarcity.

The session will bring together humanitarian and development partners and water utilities to discuss the challenges related to water in moving from a humanitarian to a development situation, recognizing that the lines between a humanitarian situation and a development situation is increasingly overlapping.

The session builds on a partnership between ICRC, UNICEF and the World Bank and drawing on examples primarily from Africa and the MENA region will focus on how the humanitarian-development divide can be overcome in the context of conflict and crises with a focus on water utilities. The session will feature participation from utilities in crisis and conflicts globally.

Where: 27 August 2018

When: Stockholm, Sweden, Room FH 202

Organizers: The World Bank Group, United Nations Children’s Fund