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LONDON, Aug 17 (TrustLaw) - What happens when you combine passion for a cause with legal expertise? You can win millions of dollars for the cause and put a powerful draft law before legislators - as U.S. lobbyists Water Advocates and law firm K&L Gates have done.
For the past five years, K&L Gates has been applying its knowledge and powers of persuasion to help the non-profit organisation - which promotes access to clean water and sanitation around the world - convince U.S. lawmakers that water deserves more funding and a bigger place in U.S. foreign and development policies.
"The numbers are just so staggering - the number of people who lack access to water and what happens as a result," said K&L Gates partner Daniel Ritter, who works with Water Advocates. "The crisis is of very significant proportions."
Drinking water is out of reach for 13 percent of the global population and almost 39 percent have no access to adequate toilet facilities, according to the World Health Organisation and the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene kill an estimated 1.5 million children under the age of five and hundreds of thousands of adults each year, they say.
In response to this crisis, K&L Gates and Water Advocates helped draw up and push through the 2005 Water for the Poor Act, which made the provision of safe water, sanitation and hygiene a specific objective of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
They have also managed to persuade the U.S. government to give USAID $315 million this year, and the same amount in 2009, to implement the bill.
The money is a big increase on the roughly $50 million that the foreign aid department was spending yearly on water before K&L Gates started advising Water Advocates, Ritter said.
"The U.S. is cutting budgets everywhere and USAID is taking a particularly heavy hit of about 10 percent this year. So the fact that water was spared from that, we see as something positive," he added.
The law has already made an impact: last year alone the United States helped provide an improved source of drinking water and better sanitation for 4 million and more than 2 million people respectively, Water Advocates said in a briefing note.
A subsequent law, also drafted with contributions from K&L Gates and Water Advocates, is currently being considered by U.S. lawmakers and the law firm expects the bill will be passed, Ritter said.
The Water for the World Act expands on the first bill and aims to ensure that 100 million people gain sustainable access to drinking water and sanitation by 2015.
To achieve that, the draft bill requires USAID to create a position for a senior adviser responsible for the agency's work on water and sanitation in developing countries.
Similarly, the U.S. State Department in charge of international relations would have to hire a coordinator to oversee the country's diplomatic policy on global water issues.
"Water scarcity's impact on global instability can be seen in many parts of the world from Darfur to the Middle East," Water Advocates said.
The act also calls on the United States to promote low-cost, sustainable technologies, such as household water treatment, public hand washing stations and latrines. Both laws benefited from firm support by several U.S. legislators, including Congressman Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat.
But K&L Gates does not intend to stop there and will continue working pro bono to influence U.S. policies on water and sanitation worldwide.
"The ideal in the long term is a sustainable commitment by the United States of $500 million a year (for water and sanitation)," Ritter said.
