Green Jobs

Africa must invest to secure clean water - General Electric - 25 February 2008

Africa should tackle the prospect of increased water scarcity by investing now in technology and not simply hoping the threat will go away, officials of America's General Electric company said on Sunday.

Governments and development partners around the world must also accept that businesses can only provide clean water to users at a price that provides a commercial return, the executives said, explaining it could not be a "gift."

"The technological breadth we have puts us in a position to really solve any problem, anywhere," Jeff Garwood, president and CEO of GE Water and Process Technologies, a GE unit, told Reuters in an interview after attending the inauguration in Algeria of Africa's biggest seawater desalination plant.

"The only issue is how fast you're going to make a decision and who is going to finance or fund it."

The UN climate panel says 75-million to 250-million people on the world's poorest continent are projected to face increased water stress by 2020. In some African countries, it says, yields from rain-fed farming could be cut by up to 50 percent by 2020.

Earl Jones, GE Water's general manager, Global Commercial Development, said the third-largest cause of death globally was water-borne disease, meaning GE was very passionate about "getting at one of the biggest killers on the planet."

But he added: "You have to make a decision to invest in the infrastructure. Hope is not a method. If you hope that it's just going to rain and that's going to take care of it, you could find yourself in a very critical situation."

Drought

"If there is something substantive going on with our climate, the drought that you're in may not end the way that it ended the last time you had a drought. That's something we see government leaders wrestling with globally."

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