Kevin Rudd on Scaling Up Global Water and Sanitation Work
Keynote Speech at World Bank Water Week 2017
On March 13, 2017, ASPI President and Chair of the Global Partnership for Sanitation and Water for All, Kevin Rudd delivered a keynote speech entitled “Taking our Work to Scale: Working Together” at the World Bank’s Water Week 2017 in Washington.
The speech addressed ten political experiences he had dealing with water scarcity during his tenure as a politician and Prime Minister of Australia, the driest continent on earth and a country that has struggled with water scarcity for centuries. Rudd discussed the challenge of collaborating across sectors, from the local to the national level, to manage water resources and maintain an environmental flow necessary to sustain system health and use for all.
He closed his speech by stating that “the absence of clean drinking water, the absence of sanitization, is one of the continued tragedies of what we are delivering through the Sustainable Development Goals process.” “Water, big or small still remains an orphan within the global system,” Rudd argued, urging the World Bank to take the lead in this critical area. (29 min., 55 sec.)