"Our main objective is to focus attention on the implementation and funding requirements for many regional initiatives and international targets" to halve water shortages by 2015, said a communique issued at the end of the Pan-African Implementation and Partnership Conference on Water.

The statement, obtained late Friday by AFP after the ministerial conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, said delegates had also agreed on setting up national panels next year to draw up 10-year plans to improve sanitation.

The African Development Bank Group (AfDB) meanwhile announced a four-year package worth 615 million dollars (502 million euros) to be used across Africa on water resource management.

Some 65 percent -- two-thirds -- of all African people living in rural areas currently lack any ready access to drinking water, according to Egyptian Water Resources Minister Mahmoud Abu-Zeid.

Almost three-quarters of these people (73 percent) have inadequate sanitation.

The ministers, who wound up their meeting two days earlier than scheduled, reached a consensus "to establish in 2004 national task forces on water and sanitation, to prepare national plans by June 30, 2005 to annually deliver safe drinking water ... by 2015."

The ministers, who were joined by scientists and representatives of the United Nations and non-governmental organisations, underlined the need to set aside "at least five percent of their national budgets for water and sanitation within five years and to increase billing and revenue collection," the communique said.

The 615 million dollar fund from the AfDB "will be used to implement programmes from 2004 to 2008," the bank's director for operation policy and review, Philbert Afrika, said late Thursday.

"Since 1967, AfDB has invested over five billion dollars on 355 projects for water supply and sanitation in Africa," he told the closing session of the conference.

"Efforts are under way to implement the African Water Vision and Framework for Action (AWVFA) that would provide adequate water supplies and sanitation to 95 percent of Africans by 2025," Afrika added.

The AWVFA requires respective African countries and development partners on water to implement programmes in their countries to help reduce water scarcity and improve sanitation to Africans.

Afrika said the fund was the result of the African Water Facility (AWF), a framework initiated by the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which is meant to provide some of the start-up financing for improved water investment and management in the continent.

NEPAD, an initiative mooted by several African leaders in 2001, is designed to boost aid and investment for the continent, as well as debt relief and access to world markets.

In return, African countries will subject themselves to peer review, a mechanism obliging states to practise good governance and implement sound democratic and economic principles.

"The African Ministerial Council on Water (AMCOW) -- the conference's lead organiser -- has assumed responsibility for guiding the implementation of the Facility and the Bank has already developed a draft legal instrument for the establishment of the AWF," Afrika said.

He said that AfDB and AMCOW had developed a short-term action plan, which includes national, regional and multi-national water projects requiring about 135 million dollars to finance.

TERRA.WIRE