IWA Development Congress and Exhibition

The IWA Development Congress and Exhibition provides a unique opportunity to signpost best practices, applied research and enabling policies to meet the water and sanitation challenges of today and tomorrow in an increasingly urbanizing world. The learning outcomes from the 2nd IWA Development Congress and Exhibition in 2011 reaffirmed some our traditional understandings but also challenged conventional thinking about how we better prepare ourselves for an uncertain future.

What we know is that we need to rethink the way we provide sanitation services to the billions of people who currently lack access and the many more who will join the planet in the years ahead. We need to empower and mandate utilities to be at the forefront of providing services to urban citizens, with a particular emphasis on the poor. We need to foster a broader understanding of urban water management that considers catchment wide interactions between stakeholders and the opportunities for green infrastructure and services need to be orientated to the growing demands of consumers that reflect local circumstances and engages with communities in a participatory manner.

Given that there remain significantly large populations that are not served with reliably safe drinking water or adequate sanitation services, the solutions required need to be applicable and effective at scale; and in implementing a portfolio of these solutions, the whole needs to be greater than the sum of its parts. Getting there requires innovation, meaningful cooperation amongst stakeholders and a truly integrated approach that serves the entire water cycle.

The overarching goal of IWA’s Development Congress series is to identify, showcase and debate practical experiences and examples of service provision in developing countries that ‘work’, and critically, ‘work at large scale’. The Congress is therefore explicitly solutions focused, rather than diagnosing the challenges and problems in the sector, which are already well documented.

Within this framework, the themes and topics of the Congress are relevant to the arena in which most progress in terms of coverage and implementation solutions must be made: urban service provision in low and middle income countries. The overarching theme for the 2013 Development Congress and Exhibition is Catalysing Urban Water Transitions.