The director of the Biodiversity Foundation, a public foundation of the Government of Spain, under the Ministry of the Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs, Ana Leiva, attended today as a guest the seminar “Water as a collective challenge: community organizations providing services”, which is being held in Zaragoza.

This meeting, promoted by CARE International in Latin America and the Caribbean, the AVINA Foundation and Ecology and Development-ECODES – members of the so-called “Agua Clara Consortium” – seeks to generate a space for dialogue between the Spanish institutions involved in the financing of cooperation and the Ibero-American responsible for innovative initiatives for access to drinking water services.

The aim is to strengthen and promote experiences developed by small-scale local operators in pursuit of access to water and sanitation services in populations in disadvantaged areas of the region. These key actors in the water sector contribute to providing services to around 40 million people in different areas of Latin America and represent a development opportunity for another 18 million people who still lack basic services. These are initiatives of governance and administrative, environmental and financial sustainability that constitute, by the way, a real advance towards the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals proposed by the United Nations for 2015.

The Biodiversity Foundation participates in the seminar to deepen the knowledge of these popular processes of organization and with the aim of cooperating with initiatives that demonstrate that it is possible to continue fighting poverty.