DEVELOPMENT: Southern Africa Unites against Water Poverty

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MAPUTO, Mozambique, Oct 18 2002 (IPS) - It is a subspecies of Africa’s pervasive poverty, and one of the most worrisome: an absence of a vital natural resource, water, that policy makers call – hydrological poverty".

A lack of clean water is hindering economic growth and poverty eradication throughout Southern Africa. Nations which share major rivers are seeking water use treaties to avoid potential conflict as demand for water resources increases.

– At stake is the development of nations," says hydrologist Samuel Kunene, who is attached to Swaziland’s Ministry of Natural Resources. ôAt stake, ultimately, are millions of lives."

Of the estimated 1.1 billion people worldwide who are not able to access clean water, 300 million live in Africa. Forty-four million are urban residents unconnected to municipal water supplies through household or yard taps or even public standpipes and boreholes. Some 256 million, or 85 percent, are rural residents who cannot draw water from boreholes, protected wells, protected springs, or even in some arid areas cannot collect sufficient rainwater.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 53 percent of Africa’s rural residents lack access to clean water and 15 percent of urban dwellers cannot draw from clean water supplies.

In the country, this lack of water exacerbates a host of diseases. In towns, danger from cholera and other waterborne diseases exists from tainted water supplies, and can led to epidemics during summer rainy seasons when storm runoff pollutes informal reservoirs.

Cholera outbreaks are also bad news for the tourism sector, and negatively impact national treasuries of the region’s countries that are increasingly promoting tourism as a sustainable industry to bring in hard currency reserves.

Swaziland’s tourism industry suffered negative growth last year, reports the Central Bank, after cholera spread following heavy rains.

ôHealth crises made worse by water shortages have direct economic consequences," says Dr. John Ndwandwe of KwaZulu/Natal, a South African province heavily dependent on tourism.

ôEradication of hydrological poverty is necessary in developmental terms, for the welfare of millions of people,” he says. ‘’But failure to address basic water needs also affects agricultural output, health services, and ecological stability as expanding human populations compete for limited resources, almost always at the expense of wildlife."

This year’s regional drought, which has put 13 million people at risk of starvation due to crop failures, has placed water issues at the forefront of policymakers’ agendas. New attention is being given to ground water supplies, as farmers who had depended on rainfall begin drilling boreholes in greater numbers.

More than a quarter of the world’s population relies on groundwater for drinking supplies. The percentage rises in peri-urban Africa, where residents live beyond the reach of city water supplies. Residents often have the economic means to drill for water.

Aquifers are being depleted because their natural replenishment cannot keep pace with use. When wells run dry, as they have in parts of Botswana and Namibia, residents depart and settlements become ghost towns.

Water rationing is an inconvenient way of life in towns that suffer habitual hydrologic impoverished, like Siteki in Swaziland and the eastern suburbs of Windhoek, Namibia.

Landlocked Swaziland entered into an agreement with its giant neighbour South Africa, which surrounds the country on three sides, to share the flow of the mighty Komati River.

The Komati River Basin Accord of 1992 ensured that the waterway, which enters Swaziland from South Africa in the northwest, meanders through the mountainous northern region and exits the country in the dry northern highveld of the northeast, would be harvested for its water in a controlled manner. Three of a series of five dams have been built for irrigation purposes.

South Africa and Swaziland shared the expense of the Komati Dam near Pigg ‘s Peak, Swaziland, which when it opened this year was the country’s most expensive public works project. But the river is also utilised by Mozambique downstream.

Last month, the Komati Accord was revised to include this third country as signatory. This had always been the plan, but years of instability following Mozambique’s lengthy civil war kept that country from participating.

Mozambique and South Africa have other water issues to negotiate. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project tied that landlocked country closer to South Africa through a system of dams that harnessed the mountaintop kingdom’s rivers for both nations’ benefit. With Mozambique, South Africa faces a more difficult challenge of undoing decades of developmental damage.

Proving that ecological damage in one country can have regional consequences, the destruction of South Africa’s Tugela Basin led directly to massive flooding in southern Mozambique that costs hundreds of people their lives, and rendered hundreds of thousands of people homeless. Over the years, 90 percent of the Tugela Basin was drained for agriculture.

Meanwhile, adjacent grasslands were defoliated due to overgrazing by cattle. Without natural vegetation and wetlands to absorb rainfall, a cyclone in 2000 brought massive flooding that flowed downstream into neighbouring Mozambique, to devastating effect.

Half the world’s wetlands have been lost to development in the past century. Wetlands are defined as areas frequently but perhaps not permanently covered with water that does not exceed six metres in depth at low tide. The loss of Southern Africa’s wetlands due to human population pressures has lessened the region’s ability to retain water that comes naturally as rain.

A web of water management systems and treaties is being put in place to reverse previous damaging policies and bring order to the chaos of water competition.

ôPeople take water for granted until the moment they don’t have any," says hydrologist Kunene. ôFor millions of Southern Africans, hydrological poverty is a reality threatening their lives right now."

DEVELOPMENT: Southern Africa Unites against Water Poverty

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MAPUTO, Mozambique, Oct 18 2002 (IPS) - It is a subspecies of Africa’s pervasive poverty, and one of the most worrisome: an absence of a vital natural resource, water, that policy makers call ôhydrological poverty”.
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