DELFT, June 15 (Reuters) - Aid donors to Africa could spend far less than the $4 billion a year they provide for water management by encouraging local communities to manage their own supplies, a Ugandan official said on Friday.

Speaking at a U.N.-backed water symposium, Ugandan Minister of Water and Environment Maria Mutagamba said that paying for tens of thousands of water technicians absorbs nearly 35 percent of Africa's total official development aid.

"Would it not be more efficient and cost-effective to employ qualified African expatriates in the place of many of these foreign technical experts?" Mutagamba suggested to Reuters on the sidelines of the symposium.

An average of 6,000 people die every day of water-related diseases such as diarrhoea, parasites and dehydration, the UNESCO-IHE Institute of Water Education said in Delft, where 250 water professionals, policy makers and scientists gathered for a three-day symposium.

Cooperation with local people often reduces the cost of water projects by using traditional knowledge such as harvesting water from banana trees, Mutagamba said.

"If you involve the people they will take care of the project, because they have a stake in it", she said.

About 1 billion people in the world have no access to safe drinking water and an additional 1 billion live without sanitation. More than 90 percent of those in each category live in Africa and Asia.

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