The Asia Pacific Water Forum (APWF), a not-for-profit, non-political network, was officially launched in September last year at the headquarters of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila.

The APWF aims at mobilising government, international donor and development agencies and civil society groups to help achieve the UN MDG target 10 of halving the number of people without access to clean water and improved sanitation by 2015.

"What we think is by coming together we can become a much more powerful force" says Ravi Narayanan, former chief executive of UK-based Water Aid and Vice President of APWF.

"The December summit will actually use our collective clout to try and persuade the heads of governments to give water the priority we think it needs in this region. So by using our own individual and collective energies, we can get them together in one place and tell them that progress is possible, that we have to work together that we can generate the political will" he added.

The Governing Council meeting of the APWF - whose president is the former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and its chairman is Singapore's Ambassador-at-Large Professor Tommy Koh - brought together in Singapore a wide array of water and sanitations experts

and development planners from the region and international agencies like UNESCO, UNHabitat, UNESCAP, UNICEF, UNDP and the FAO, as well as the ADB and civil society organisations working in the field.

Reports commissioned by the agencies last year gave a variety of facts and figures to show why water and sanitation should be at the top of the development agenda of the region. A WHO-UNICEF report indicated that 655 million people are still without safe drinking water and 1.9 billion without access to basic sanitation in the region.

The Asia-Pacific region has accounted for 80 per cent of the world's total deaths due to water-related disasters between 2001-2005 according to the international disasters database.

A report commissioned by ADB last year - 'Asia Water Watch 2015' - estimated that $8 billion a year needs to be invested on water and sanitation in the region in the coming decade to achieve the MDG 10 targets by 2015.

"Water covers all aspects of human activities. Therefore the water is not only the problem of water ministers. That's our understanding and we would like the summit to result in the Head of States understanding the importance of water, and they put water as a number one issue of that country, especially the developing countries" says Hideaki Oda of the Japan Water Forum (JWF).

Le-Huu Ti, Chief of the Sustainable Development and Water Resource Section of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) believes that setting up the APWF is a good start in taking water and sanitation to the top of the development agenda in the region.