Ivy saw her shack burned down by accident last year in a shantytown riot against Zimbabwean immigrants accused of stealing scarce jobs from locals. In her late 30s and the breadwinner for three children, she is one of millions of poor, black South Africans who have been hooked up to fresh water since the end of white rule in 1994.

Women and children at the squatter camp where she used to live still queue for water with buckets and jars at a communal tap. But they may not have to queue for long. Over the past eight years the government has given seven million people access to clean water, mostly in poor rural areas. Municipalities have hooked up another three million.

Another seven million still need water piped to them. "In 1994, when we asked people in rural areas what their highest priority was, they said water," Mike Muller, the director general of South Africa's Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, told Reuters. "You simply cannot do without." The plan is to give everyone access to safe water by 2008.

As part of a plan to give everyone proper sanitation by 2010, more than three million people have been given toilets, leaving about 18 million still reliant on holes in the ground.

South Africa is a leader in the global drive, as outlined in the United Nations' Millennium goals, to halve the number of people without safe drinking water by 2015.

"Among developing countries, South Africa is foremost in regards to water issues," said Gouri Sankar, executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), which monitors water matters for the United Nations.

Setting out the way for the achievement of the Millennium goals is one aim of the U.N.'s World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) to be held in Johannesburg from August 26 to September 4.

The summit will be preceded by two days of last-ditch preparatory talks to hammer out a global blueprint for eradicating poverty, stemming the spread of AIDS and supplying clean water to the world's thirsty, among other lofty goals.

UNFOLDING GLOBAL NIGHTMARE

Repeating South Africa's success on a global level is going to be a daunting task. According to the United Nations' 1998 Human Development Report, three-fifths of the 4.4 billion people in the developing world lacked access to basic sanitation and almost a third had no access to clean drinking water.

By some estimates, preventable water-related diseases kill 10,000 to 20,000 children every day in the developing world.

A more recent U.N. study says that of the over 800 million people in Africa, 300 million lack adequate sanitation.

"...some 100 million Africans had gained access to sanitation during the 1990s, but this has been outpaced by rapid urban growth and population pressures within the same period," the WSSCC said in at statement.

The World Bank says that even to halve the number of people without water, around 300,000 people would have to be connected every day for 10 years, at an annual cost of $25 billion.

And while there millions who still can't turn on a tap to quench their thirst or take a bath, consumption rates are soaring.

The United Nations says the world's population tripled in the 20th century, but water consumption multiplied six-fold. Agriculture is by far the biggest consumer, taking 67 percent of all the water that is used by humanity.

SCARCE?

For something so vital, water seems frighteningly scarce. Freshwater ecosystems cover less than one percent of the earth. Ice, mostly in the form of glaciers, holds 69 percent of the world's fresh water and 30 percent is underground.