Non-Governmental Organizations
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)
Nkatha Gitonga, Director
Dear Delegates,
Welcome to Harvard Model UN’s 60th session. My name is Nkatha Gitonga, and I look forward to having you in the Non-Governmental Organizations Committee next year. I come from Kenya, where I have lived all my life, with a few trips to Europe. This is my first year in the United States and it’s lovely. For those of you with histories like mine, I hope you will confirm this after the conference! Currently, I am a member of the Class of 2015, considering a major in Applied Math and Economics and a citation in German. Apart from model UN, I teach peer health workshops in public schools located in and around Boston.
Let me take this opportunity and congratulate you on making it to next year’s conference. I am confident that we are going to have an exciting experience as we get ready for the conference. Of course, the peak of all the fun will be at the conference come January next year. As NGO representatives, you will have the advantage of interacting with each other in our NGO committee setting, as well as with other delegates in the committees to which you will be assigned.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Water and Development,” which sets the NGOs’ focus topic. As the conference approaches, please familiarize yourself with your NGOs’ history and mission and the milestones they have made as far as water and development is concerned. A study guide and a program guide will be released in good time to guide you in your preparations.
Please feel free to email me with any questions or concerns you might have about the conference, the committee, the topics, or life at Harvard. I would also be glad to get to hear from you and to know you before the conference! Email me! Get excited! It’s going to be fantastic! See you in January!
Warm regards,
Nkatha Gitonga
About Me
Class Year: 2015
Concentration: Applied Math & Economics
Hometown: Chogoria, Kenya
Favorite Place: East African Coast
Favorite Food: Steamed Broccoli
Favorite MUN Moment: It’s always awesome listening to our intelligent delegates!
Why did you choose these topics? They say water is life (cliché? Sorry!) What could be better discussed than life?
Some advice for new delegates: be adequately prepared. Poise yourself for active participation in all the fun both in and out of the committee.
HMUN is the best because…it’s fun and enlightening at the same time.
Topic Area: Water and Development
For as long as the human race has existed, it has always derived its life from water. Centuries later, the situation is no different. Individual water consumption sustains life, and even more relevant to twenty-first century development goals, key sectors that underlie development such as industrialization, agriculture, and energy production rely heavily on the availability of reliable water supply. The quality of water and of aquatic ecosystems also influences the health of the working population and of fishing and water transport industries, other determinants of development. Thus, the water crisis the earth is undergoing, accounts a great deal for slow development and therefore poverty in the severely affected parts of the world.
Against this backdrop of worsening water situation, several UN conferences have sought to address water issues. Both the Mar del Plata conference of 1977 and the International Conference on Water and the Environment in Dublin in 1992 placed water at the center of sustainable development and set targets to foster water management, very few of which have been met.
More ambitious and influential targets resulted from the UN summit of 2000 that set the Millennium Development Goals for 2015. Among other goals, this summit aimed to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. A little over a decade later, the WHO/UNICEF joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation is happy to announce that this threshold was reached towards the end of 2010, five years ahead of schedule. What this means is that 1.8 billion people gained access to sanitation and over 2 billion gained access to improved water sources. This is a major achievement but a lot still needs to be done. Over 780 million people are yet to access improved sources of drinking water and a whopping 2.5 billion do not have improved sanitation.