– Ethiopia, Niger, Haiti receive US$20The world’s most water-deprived countries are receiving help from the World Bank to improve conditions. A study said that water shortages are being felt in more than 40 countries and are at risk of getting worse, a Washington Post report said yesterday.Guyana receives US$140 per capita of World Bank water related projects while Ethiopia,NBA Jerseys China, Haiti and Niger get $20, a study has shown.About a third of the bank’s total lending — more than $54 billion — was linked to water shortages between 1997 and 2007, but there was little correlation between the flow of funds and the depth of a country’s water problems, according to the report from the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group.Ethiopia, Haiti and Niger, for example, all ranked at the bottom of a Water Poverty Index analysts used to measure the availability of water in a country against demand.All three had received only about $20 per capita in World Bank funding for water projects — compared with the more than $140 per capita provided to Guyana,NBA Jerseys China, a country classified as “water-rich.”There is “no clear relationship between Bank water lending and water stress” in a country, the report noted, outlining the mismatch as one of several areas the bank needs to address in helping the less developed and developing world tackle water shortages that are expected to grow severe in coming decades.Within five years,Cheap MLB Jerseys Authentic, the number of people without access to clean drinking water may reach 800 million, and the number lacking basic sanitation could hit 1.8 billion, the IEG said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.Jamal Saghir, the bank’s director of energy, transport and water, said the evaluation report overlooked what he described as a rapid shift in the bank’s priorities toward water projects overall and particularly in funding for the nations facing the worst problems.He said that bank funding for water projects had tripled since 2003 and that about 60 percent of the funding for active projects was going to water-poor nations. “We’ve been moving on this,wholesale jerseys,” Saghir said.The study found that although the World Bank in general was managing water projects better than in the past and completing them successfully, it needed to do more on basic issues such as sanitation and help countries control demand by charging appropriate tariffs to farmers and other heavy users.The issue is a politically sensitive one,Cheap Jerseys China, particularly in nations that subsidise the water rates paid by farmers to sustain sometimes inefficient domestic farming operations and protect the associated jobs.“We are not saying that in Bank projects the poorest farmers have to cover the full cost of the water they are using,NFL Jerseys Supply,” said Ronald Parker, the lead author of the report. But “we would like more frankness on this topic. . . . Countries have begun a process of rationalisation that in the way they use water, there are tradeoffs to make.”Bank analysts, he noted, are preparing more direct assessments of water policy, so that countries can understand how a farm irrigation programme in one part of the country might affect the water supply in a distant urban area — and the costs involved in each.The misalignment of bank funding and water needs is not only the bank’s fault, said Parker and Vinod Thomas, head of the Independent Evaluation Group, an arm of the World Bank that assesses the effectiveness of its programmes. Countries set their own priorities when deciding what projects to fund and may have different ideas about what is most urgent.