The management of water resources is proving to be a major international challenge. In March 2007 international scientists and development workers responded to serious concerns about increasing water scarcity and the attendant implications for hunger and poverty by calling for an expansion of the goals embodied in the United Nations Millennium Declaration. More specifically, the Vientiane Statement espouses a vision that comprises ‘a more water and food secure world, one where water management, innovative technologies and effective institutional arrangements work together towards eliminating hunger, poverty and disease, and where ecological services and resource quality are preserved’. Ambitiously, the authors of the Statement contended that ‘such a world is within our reach’ (CGIAR, 2007, p1). And yet the problems emanating from injudicious water management are far from new. Almost a decade earlier Serageldin (1996, p50) observed that continued growth of world population alone had reduced per capita water supplies by one-third since 1970. In 1994 approximately 11.11 billion people in developing countries did not have access to safe drinking water and some 2.87 billion souls lacked adequate sanitation. While the World Health Organization (1996) was predicting an improvement in access to safe water supplies by the year 2000, the number of people without adequate sanitation was simultaneously expected to rise to 3.31 billion. A decade before the Vientiane Statement was produced pundits were predicting that population growth, accompanied by higher rates of industrialization, urbanization and the extension of agriculture would result in as many as 52 countries and 3 billion people having insufficient water supplies by 2025, largely dispelling much of the progress achieved during the International Drinking-Water and Sanitation Decade of 1981–90 (Serageldin, 1996, p50; Helmer, 1997, p40). By 2006, UNWater (2008) optimistically reported that, overall, the world was on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals in the context of drinking water. However, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania were expected to fall well short of the 2015 objective ‘leaving significant portions of the population without access to improved drinking-water supplies’ (UN-Water, 2008, p9). Needless to add, the global goal for access to sanitation is not expected to be met by the target date of 2015