From the above review, it is clear that for much of the NEPAD agenda positive contributions can be made by water and the negative impacts of the development activities can be mitigated. For this to be achieved, the critical issues that face water in Africa need to be identified and addressed.
Water is one of the most valuable natural assets that Africa has. Viewed at the continental level and having regard to the average amount of water available per year per unit area on the continent, Africa appears to be endowed with abundant water resources. It has 17 rivers with a total estimated catchment area of over 100,000 km2, 160 lakes larger than 27 km2. It has vast wetlands and a limited but widespread groundwater resource. In addition, it has a huge potential for energy production through hydropower production.
This picture of water in Africa, is however deceptive because the distribution of water in Africa is uneven and unequal both in time and in location. While there are parts like Central Africa and the Congo region where there is abundant water, there are sub-regions and countries in Africa that are experiencing growing water scarcity. Moreover, there are natural and man-made challenges that make it difficult to capture the inherent benefits and the full potential in Africa’s water resources to support sustainable developments in Africa. There are aggravating factors that make it even more difficult to address these challenges. Yet the challenges need to be addressed adequately to pave the way for good stewardship of Africa’s water resources, for protecting the gains of Africa’s development from being wiped away by the destructive forces of water, for ensuring good demand and supply management of these resources, and for their efficient and equitable distribution to satisfy the rising and competing demands and uses anticipated in the NEPAD program.
The three top critical issues facing water in African are:
- High rainfall variability and climate change
- Managing the multiplicity of transboundary water basins
- Creating sustainable access to water
High Rainfall Variability and Climate Change
One of the biggest challenges in African water resources is the high degree of temporal and spatial variability and unpredictability of rainfall. In the dry countries like Namibia, the interval between rains can be long, and most of the annual rainfall occurs over a short period; in other countries the change in rainfall from one season to another can be high, with rainfall variation being as high as +/- 35 percent in some cases. Prolonged droughts are unpredictably followed by devastating floods. An example of this is in Mozambique which, along with Angola and Zambia became significantly drier over a 30-year period only to be hit by a devastating flood in the year 2000. It appears that the drier the country or sub-region, the higher the rainfall variability in time and quantity. Thus the drier parts of Ethiopia experience drought every four years. In the desert areas, the coefficient of rainfall variation can be as high as 200%; in the semi-arid regions, it is 40%; and in the humid areas, it is 5-31%. The drought risk is highest in the Sudano-Sahelian belt, and in Southern Africa.
These variations have high social and economic costs. In Zimbabwe, for instance, there appeared to be a correlation between rainfall variability and real GDP growth over the period of 1970 to 1993. The floods in Mozambique in the year 2000 had an immediate significant impact on the country’s economy. For example, projected annual GDP growth rate for 2000 was 23% lower after the flood; and projected inflation increased by 44%. Table 2 shows the social and economic impacts of drought and floods in selected countries.
Table 2: Social and Economic Impacts of Climate and Rainfall Variability in Selected African Countries
| Country |
Event |
Year |
Impact |
| Ethiopia |
Drought |
1983/84 |
300,000 deaths |
| Zimbabwe |
Drought |
1991/92 |
45% decline in agricultural production
11% decline in GDP
62% decline in stock market
9% decline in manufacturing
15% reduction in power generation
|
| Kenya and Tanzania |
El Nino Rains |
1998 |
Infrastructure destroyed
Disease and economy-wide damage |
| Mozambique and Sudan |
Floods |
2000 |
Deaths
Homes & infrastructure destroyed
Economy-wide shock |
| Source: David Grey (2001), World Bank |
Overlain on this already challenging picture is the threat posed by climate change, already addressed above. An indication of the potential impact is gained from predictions for areas of West Africa which suggest that the probability of occurrence two successive years of drought could increase three fold.
Factors that exacerbate the impact of rainfall variability therefore include:
- Lack of cooperation within transboundary water basins
- Lack of information: no early warning systems in place
- Lack of engineering control options such as storage facilities
- Expansion of agriculture without integration of water, land and forestry management
- Producing watershed degradation, flashy rivers, and more floods and droughts
- Further impact of global climate change on rainfall variability
Multiplicity of Transboundary Water Basins
One of the legacies of Africa’s colonial history is the multiplicity of transboundary water basins in the region. Virtually every Sub-Saharan African country, plus Egypt, shares at least one international river basin. There are about 80 international water basins in Africa. There are up to ten countries per basin and many basins per country, one extreme case being Guinea which has 12 international rivers. For some downstream countries, very high percentages of total flows originate from outside their boundaries. A typical example is Egypt, with almost all of its total flow originating from outside its borders. With Mauritania and Botswana, the corresponding figures are 95 and 94, respectively.
Table 3 gives information on the six major international water basins in Africa.
Table 3: Major Transboundary Water Basins in Africa
| Name of Basin |
Countries within Basin |
Countries in Basin |
Existence of Basin Organization |
| Nile Basin |
10 |
Burundi, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire |
Yes |
| Congo Basin |
9 |
Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia |
|
| Niger Basin |
9 |
Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria |
Yes |
| Zambezi Basin |
8 |
Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe |
|
| Lake Chad Basin |
8 |
Algeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Libya, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan |
Yes |
| Volta Basin |
6 |
Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali |
No |
| Adapted from presentation by David Grey, World Bank |
Since it is now generally held that water resources management is best done at the basin level, it follows that the situation in Africa calls for cooperation between countries with shared water basins. Yet very few water basin organizations exist in Africa for this purpose and even where they do, they often lack the resources to manage effectively. The paucity of cooperation within such basin organizations results in reduced early warning capacity, increased risk of vulnerability to flooding, reduced water availability, especially for downstream countries.
Properly resourced basin organizations would have several benefits. They can ensure enhanced monitoring and early warning; they provide opportunities for information and risk sharing; they facilitate pooling of technical and financial resources, thereby reducing the burden on individual countries and they make it possible also to plan at an appropriate scale.
They also allow for joint mitigation and economic development programs to maximize the benefits inherent in basin-wide management of water resources. It is noteworthy that the measures that are made possible through inter-country cooperation among countries with common shared water basins are, basically, elements of IWRM.
Creating Sustainable Access to Water
One of the major challenges facing Africa today is how to make up the deficiencies in creating sustainable access to water for drinking water supply and sanitation, agriculture and food security, and environmental sustainability.
Access to Water for Drinking Supply and Sanitation:
It is generally known that water supply and sanitation have a significant impact on health and labour productivity. Rural water supply, sanitation, and health education have significant impacts on infant and child mortality, female education, and economic productivity of rural women.
Yet, according to WHO’s global water supply and sanitation assessment report for 2000, Africa has the lowest total water supply coverage of any region in the world. Only 62 percent of its population has access to improved water supply. Urban coverage is estimated to be 85 percent compared with the rural coverage of 47 percent. Sanitation coverage is also poor. Only 60 percent of Africa’s total population has access to improved sanitation services. Urban coverage is reported to be 84 percent compared with a rural coverage of 45 percent.
Access to urban services remained the same over the 1990s. In contrast, rural water supply coverage appears to have increased slightly while rural sanitation coverage fell. In absolute terms, 135 million people are reported to have gained access to improved water supply in Africa during 1990-2000. The majority of these (87 million) were in urban areas. For sanitation, 98 million people gained access to improved sanitation services during the same period, the vast majority (84 million) living in urban areas.
The target set in The Africa Water Vision is to reduce the proportion of African people without access to safe and adequate water supply by 75 percent by the year 2015. The global target is lower; it is aimed at reducing the figure only by 50 percent by 2015.
Given the fact that the African population is expected to increase by about 65 percent over the next 25 years, meeting even the global target for coverage by the year 2015 is a major challenge. In the urban areas, an additional 204 million people must be supplied with safe drinking water supply. In the rural areas, an additional 194 million people will have to be provided with access to water to meet the global target for 2015. On the whole, a total of 400 million people will need to be provided with access to improved water supply go meet the 2015 global target.
Africa has two options: it either has to revise its targets or it must come up with innovative and efficient approaches. Similar options face the sanitation sector. This is the challenge facing the creation of access to water supply and sanitation. There is an even greater challenge in ensuring reliability of the services that already exist.
Access to Water for Agriculture and Food Security: As noted earlier, water is a critical and limiting resource in agriculture and food security. Yet, with the exception of the humid regions of Central and coastal West Africa, there is a growing scarcity of water in almost all Africa. In North Africa, water resources for agriculture are already over-taxed. This is particularly true of groundwater resources that have been severely over-exploited, resulting in seawater intrusion in some areas. Even here, it is believed that there is scope for a potential expansion of irrigation by about 30 percent. The scope for expansion could be as much as 300 percent in sub-Saharan Africa where irrigation is responsible for only about 9 percent of the crops produced, compared to about 33 percent in North Africa. In the humid and sub-humid areas water is more abundant, and there is an estimated 85 percent of the irrigation potential that remains untapped. The existence of this potential does not necessarily mean that it is going to be possible to create the needed access to water to meet the needs for agriculture and food security. Among the challenges to providing access to water for agriculture are the following:
- Rapid rate of increase in demand for food production in response to the high rate of population growth rate in Africa, which is estimated to be the highest in the world
- Inefficiency of existing irrigation systems, with some having an estimated wastage of as much as 60 percent of pumped water
- Climate change and the high temporal and spatial variability of rainfall in Africa, inadequate facilities for predicting the changes coupled with limited capacity to fund the costs of adaptation needed
- Competing demands from growing municipal and industrial sectors that are likely to be intensified as a result of the NEPAD program
- The high demands of water by the agricultural sector relative to municipal and industrial demands; agriculture uses as much as 80 percent of allocated water
These challenges will have to be overcome if sustained access to water for agriculture and food security is to be achieved to support the African target for agricultural growth which is about 4 percent per annum during 1990-2020,as well as the target for food security which is set at 80 percent of the African population by 2015.
Access to Water for Environmental Sustainability: Sustainable development depends upon three key factors, namely environmental protection, social development, and economic growth and development. Of these, the critical and limiting factor is environmental protection. The life supporting environmental resources in Africa include its soils, lands, forests, wetlands, and aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; it also includes its coastal waters, as well as its biodiversity. These are the sources of food, water and the oxygen we breathe. Since the environmental sustainability depends upon some of the water produced by the environment itself, enough water needs to be left for the sustainability of the environment. However, given the increasing demands on water for various components of development, it is easy for water exploitation to exceed the threshold for environmental sustainability to the detriment of our survival. The challenge is to determine this threshold and leave behind enough water in the environment to meet the minimum needs for environmental sustainability.
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