Friday, April 19, 2024
News and Views from the Global South
SOUTHERN AFRICA: Securing Safe Water for a Million More
Servaas van den Bosch
- Long years of armed conflict have obstructed development in the areas on either side of the Angola-Namibia border. Now a 45 million dollar infrastructure upgrade is set to improve access to clean drinking water and decent sanitation for one million people.
Drawing water from the Calueque Canal - infrastructure upgrade will improve access for rural comunities in Angola and Namibia. Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS
“For many years, the area around the Calueque dam in Angola was the theatre of wars between governments and various guerilla movements,” says the Kunene Transboundary Water Supply Project (KTWSP) co-chair, Dr Kuiri Tjipangandjara of Namibia Water Corporation, Namwater.
“It’s unique to set up such a project in a post-conflict zone, and extremely challenging. Even more so because this project is the only one of its kind in the region, so we don’t have a model to refer to.”
The system runs from the Calueque Dam in Southern Angola to the northern Namibian business hub of Oshakati and then back up into Angola again, all the way to the town of Ondjiva.
The Kunene Transboundary Water Supply Project, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development through the German development bank KfW and the Angolan and Namibian governments, is the first of its kind in the 15-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) and aims to develop and rehabilitate the water supply and sanitation infrastructure in the border region.
One of the complications facing the water utilities is the balancing act the project will have to perform between enforcing formal water rights that prohibit extraction from the canal or pipeline and accommodating the widespread informal use of water by the communities throughout the system.
People like Maria Eelu (16) from Northern Namibia are at the canal several mornings a week to load dozens of buckets of unsafe drinking water on to a donkey cart. Access to running water in the Omaulai settlement where she lives - like the whole rural Omusati region - is troublesome.
Farmers contacted by IPS in northern Namibia also readily admit to using the canal for irrigation of their fields, something that will no longer be possible with the arrival of a pipeline.
But officials argue that the current irrigation practices are not only unsustainable, but also unfair, as small-scale farmers covered by government-supported irrigation projects in the area have to pay Namwater for the water they use.
"Why should people be allowed to illegally take water from the canal?" asks Dr Kuiri Tjipangandjara, from the Namibia Water Corporation.
"This practice constitutes a risk to water security. Besides, the water in the canal is not purified and definitely not fit for human consumption."
In Angola agriculture has taken off since the end of the civil war and a process is under way to formalise water off-take from Calueque to prevent illegal irrigation by the growing numbers is farmers. Finalising this has been slowed by the lack of a functioning water utility in Angola.
"This is, however, changing rapidly with the establishment of such an authority," says Tjipangandjara.
The infrastructure upgrade and the building of a pipeline will have the two-fold benefit of providing the region's residents with clean, fresh water and permitting better regulation to ensure the supply is sustainable.
For that to happen the planners will need to address the water needs of current informal users.
The water supply on the Angolan side of the border still bears the scars of a devastating civil war and a colonial past.
“Under the Portuguese occupation, holes of 50 by 60 metres were dug to capture floodwater. These so-called chimpacas are still the main water source for the population,” says Thomas Kellner, technical advisor of GIZ (German International Cooperation), which will help local engineers with the overhaul.
But these pools are far from safe.
“Cattle drink from the chimpacas, but 25 metres further you see people washing themselves and doing their laundry, while at the other side people are drawing water for drinking. The water typically has a brown-reddish colour, but several months after the rainy season it will turn green, because it is filled with algae.”
This part of Angola has no piped water, no treatment plants and no sewage systems. While the levels of water-borne diseases are not well-documented, experts stress that child mortality is far above the African average.
In the area’s few towns, the situation is not much better, says Kellner. “A person with a borehole will make water his business. He drives around in a bowser and sells it for as much as $20 per cubic metre.”
In some areas the local authorities exploit well fields – a collection of boreholes – from which they pump water into public tanks.
But many of the boreholes are old and dilapidated. Angola has embarked on a programme called ‘Water for Everyone’, that will see the rehabilitation of 524 boreholes in Cunene province and the drilling of 600 new ones.
In Namibia the water from Calueque runs through an open canal for 150 kilometres from the Angolan border to Oshakati, where it is treated and pumped through a network to all major communities between Oshakati and Oshikango border post. The canal is the only fresh water supply for over 700,000 people and is often damaged by floods and illegal off-take.
Many people along the canal use the water for household purposes or to irrigate their fields,” explains water management expert Andreas Shilomboleni who runs a Global Environmental Facility -funded project that helps farmers in the area adapt to climate change.
“But currently the canal is open. That means that the further from the source you get, the higher the amount of total dissolved solids, basically meaning the water becomes dirtier.”
The course followed by the two-metre wide, concrete-lined ditch is not ideal.
“In Namibia the canal is not perpendicular to the flow of the water in the rainy season. Flood waters cause damage to the canal resulting in maintenance issues,” says Shilomboleni. The canal rapidly fills with sediment as floodwaters cross it.”
Along the length of the canal, people have also grown accustomed to illegally drawing water for domestic use and for irrigation.
These are among the many challenges the KTWSP will have to take into consideration when embarking on a complete overhaul of water infrastructure in the border area.
The project will see substantial repairs to infrastructure at the dam and the pipeline, upgrading of the power supply to the motors that pump the water southwards and refurbishing of the pumps itself. Extra pipelines will be built to supply Ondjiva with fresh water and new power lines have to erected over many hundreds of kilometres to feed new pump installations.
“About 300,000 people in Southern Angola will now for the first time have access to safe and clean drinking water,” says Kellner.
A final step will be replacing the open canal in Namibia with a pipeline. A feasibility study into this project – which Kellner estimates will cost more than 100 million dollars – will likely commence later this year.
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