People use plastic containers to collect drinking water in Havana. Water supply problems have worsened in recent months in Cuba, partly due to power outages that interrupt water pumping through hydraulic networks and, at times, equipment breakdowns. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

By Dariel Pradas
HAVANA, Feb 28 2025 (IPS)

Problems such as hydraulic network breakdowns, water lost through leaks, power outages, and even fuel shortages are making access to water supply services difficult for the population in Cuba

“Terrible,” is how Mariam Alba, a café employee and resident of Manzanillo, a city 750 kilometers east of Havana in the eastern province of Granma, described the water supply situation to IPS.“In my neighborhood we have water almost every day, but I know places that go months without it. In the early hours, you see people carrying water from a hole filled by a leak. It’s not drinking water:” Mariam Alba.

“In my neighborhood, Reparto Gutierrez, we have water almost every day, but I know places that go months without it. In the early hours, you see people carrying water from a hole filled by a leak. It’s not drinking water. On some blocks, they’ve placed tanks: they fill them in the morning, and by night they’re empty. Then they refill them a month later,” she added.

In this province with 804,000 people, only 76% receive piped water in their homes, and just 38.7% have access to water at least once every three days. Meanwhile, over 66,000 residents depend on water delivered by tanker trucks, as confirmed by Granma’s Hydraulic Resources authorities in an interview with IPS in August 2024.

A month after that interview, the National Institute of Hydraulic Resources (INRH) announced that over 30,000 people in the province lacked access to water services, out of a total of more than 600,000 nationwide.

In Havana, where supply issues may not be as prolonged as in Manzanillo, they are more widespread: around 130,000 “customers” were affected last September.

“I’ve gone up to two weeks without water due to a supposed break in the (hydraulic) network. Then the issue gets fixed, but comes up again soon after. In the 40 years I’ve lived here, there hasn’t been a single day when I wasn’t unsure if the water would come or not,” Flora Alvarez, a 43-year-old accountant living in Centro Habana, told IPS.

A worker from Aguas de La Habana supervises the filling of a water tanker truck that supplies drinking water to residents of Havana communities. By early February 2025, over 600,000 people in Cuba were receiving water permanently through tanker trucks. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

An Infrastructure Problem

Cuba lacks large rivers and, being an island, faces the constant risk of saline intrusion into its groundwater. It relies heavily on rainfall, so droughts severely impact water supply, especially in the agricultural sector.

However, 2024 was not as marked by this climate change effect as previous years: accumulated rainfall reached 97% of the national historical average, and reservoirs were at 63% of their total capacity, or 98% of the usual level for early February, when the INRH presented its annual report.

The problem begins with over 40% of pumped water being lost due to leaks in major pipelines, hydraulic network branches – sometimes visible on dozens or hundreds of Havana streets – and even from dripping faucets in homes.

Hydraulic sector officials acknowledge the existence of 2,500 to 3,000 such leaks.

Secondly, pump equipment breakdowns or interruptions due to frequent power outages, characteristic of Cuba’s energy crisis, also degrade service quality, which not everyone has access to.

In this Caribbean island nation of about 10 million inhabitants, only 83.9% are supplied water by public Water and Sanitation companies, 4.5% more than at the end of 2023, according to the annual report.

The INRH acknowledged in its report that this improvement is largely due to a decrease in population.

Meanwhile, investment in creating new connections to hydraulic networks and other sanitation work has slowed, reaching only 45% of the planned target, due to the negative impact of U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba and unpaid debts to creditors.

Additionally, only 61.2% of the population has access to “risk-free” drinking water services, 1.6% more than in 2023.

The “risk-free” definition aligns with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “safely managed” standard, which refers to access to “drinking water from an improved water source that is located on premises, available when needed, and free from faecal and priority chemical contamination.”

By early February, over 600,000 people were receiving water permanently through tanker trucks, and nearly 1.5 million through “easy access” points, where people can fetch water in less than 30 minutes, including travel and waiting time.

However, these figures do not account for the thousands affected by “temporary” pipeline breaks, who must then carry water from easy access points or rely on tanker trucks that arrive as frequently as fuel supplies allow –  another recurring issue in Cuba.

The company Aguas de La Habana lays a high-density polyethylene pipe as part of the installation of new hydraulic networks in the Cuban capital. In 2024, the government installed 241 kilometers of new water supply networks, mains, and connections to alleviate chronic water supply issues. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Slow Progress

“The goals and targets planned for 2024 were met at an acceptable level, considering the adverse scenario,” summarizes the INRH’s annual report.

This optimism is based on the fact that, despite only resolving around 60% of public complaints or reports in several provinces, 241 kilometers of networks, mains, and new water supply connections were installed.

Or an average of 512 liters of water per inhabitant per day, representing 91.8% of the planned amount, though distribution remains uneven, as the figures show.

The INRH also worked on installing 32 water treatment plants, 10 wastewater treatment plants, and 9 desalination plants, as well as replacing pumping equipment and installing nearly 25,000 water meters, useful for promoting water conservation with tariffs based on actual consumption. Without these, many households pay a fixed monthly fee.

However, authorities predict that the core water problems will continue to “flow” through 2025, despite the government’s multimillion-dollar investments to improve the situation.

Water tanks installed in homes in a Bulawayo suburb. The city has been facing a decades long water crisis. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Oct 21 2020 (IPS)

Dotted across the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo, the water tanks installed in private residences is evidence that years of a water crisis, that has seen some suburbs here going for months without running water, has not spared anyone. The large plastic drums, locally called Jojo tanks after the company that manufacturers them, and which have a storage range of up to 10,000 litres, have assumed a class status of sorts in Bulawayo.

Desperate residents, like Philemon Hadebe, who can afford to have responded to the water crises by installing the giant tanks in their residences.

Such tanks are traditionally used to harvest rain water and also store groundwater, but in COVID—19’s new normal, everything has been upended.

“This is about survival,” Hadebe told IPS.

“You cannot go for weeks without water in a house where you have kids that’s why I bought this thing,” he said pointing to the 2,500 litre water tank in his yard.

“I let the water run whenever it is made available (in the taps) and it has helped a lot to stock up for when the taps run dry for days and even weeks,” he said.

Is he is not concerned about the water bill?

“You have no time to worry about the water bill. These are desperate times,” Hadebe said. It’s despite the fact that the local municipality has lamented the failure of residents to settle their bills, which the council says has crippled service delivery.

Those residents who cannot afford bulk storage use any container available, including 2-litre plastic containers. But when these  run out, they turn to unprotected water sources, a practice city health officials say has resulted in a spike of waterborne diseases such as typhoid and dysentery.

Last week, the city’s health department reported an increase in diarrhoea cases, with residents saying the municipality has done little to solve the decades old water crisis.

The local authority blames water shortages on a range of factors that include low levels in supply dams, breakdown of infrastructure installed before the country’s independence in 1980 and also constant power outages said to cripple pumping water from dams.

“The water crisis is man made,” said Emmanuel Ndlovu, coordinator of the Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BUPRA).

“Bulawayo has always faced a perennial water problem which has been met with a tepid preparedness by council. Every year the city is plunged into a crisis. The last such crisis was in 2007 but the current one has been the worst ever,” Ndlovu told IPS.

While some residents are installing water tanks, this comes at a steep cost.

Prices of water tanks range from about $1,000 for a 10,000 litre tank to $280 for 2,500 litres and $460 for 5,000 litres.

Business has been brisk for the manufacturers, but this has come at a huge cost for the city’s efforts to save the little water left in supply dams.

Early this month, the city’s town clerk Christopher Dube highlighted the extent of the water crisis, telling local media that the city had run out ideas.

“We no longer have water in the city while consumption has increased. Residents have also resorted to buying Jojo tanks (bulk water containers) and whenever we shut supplies we do so because our reservoirs would have run dry,” Dube said.

The municipality says stocking water by residents has led to a citywide increase of water consumption, and fines imposed on excessive water used have not deterred residents such as Hadebe.

Other residents have resorted to sinking boreholes in their homes, and selling the water. But concerns have previously been raised by municipality about the haphazard and unregulated groundwater.

As part of long-term efforts to address the water crisis, and which might render domestic bowsers redundant, the African Development Bank (AfDB) is supporting the city with a $33 million grant under the Bulawayo Water and Sewerage Services Improvement Project (BWSSIP).

According to the AfDB, the grant will “rehabilitate and upgrade water production treatment facilities, water distribution, sewer drainage networks and wastewater treatment disposal facilities in the southwestern part of the city”.

City mayor Solomon Mguni told IPS he could not discuss the issue, but in a council report last month he blamed the crisis on “vandalism of infrastructure and power outages which interrupt pumping”.

For now, residents with the financial clout are creating their own domestic solutions albeit at a cost for the long term sustainability of already strained water sources.

Pressure groups however insist the city could have done better.

“Despite the fact that water account is a the cash cow for the Bulawayo City Council, there is less investment in water resources,” Ndlovu said.

Meanwhile, the country’s meteorological services department has forecast above normal rains this season, which could provide not only relief to the parched city, but could also be bad news to Jojo tank retailers.

The marginal farmer who depends solely on rain irrigation needs water, agricultural and energy innovations the most. Three farmer families help each other to plough their small farms and seed them as monsoon arrives in Warangal district in Andhra Pradesh. Credit: Manipadma Jena / IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NEW DELHI, Aug 12 2019 (IPS)

“The Perfect Storm” was a dire prediction that by 2030 food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources together with climate change would threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration from worst-affected regions.

It is a term coined a decade back in 2009 by Sir John Beddington, the United Kingdom’s then Chief Scientific Adviser. But in 2019 the prediction seems to be a real possibility—particularly for developing countries.

The current drive for a food- and nutrition-secure world, as well as the vision of feeding an estimated global population of 10 billion in 2050, is held hostage today by the unsustainable nexus between agriculture, water and energy. This is all further exacerbated by the climate emergency upon us.

“We have, over the years, tended to overuse both water and energy in agricultural operations, practices that are now at odds with the challenges due to the emerging changes in hydrology and the increasing global concentration of greenhouse gases,” says Ajay Mathur, Director General of The Energy and Resources Institute, India.

“Those of us who work on water issues in (the global) South understand that there have been decades of mismanagement of our land, water, energy and ecosystems due to poor policies, whose effects are now being compounded due to climate change,” adds Aditi Mukherji, Principal Researcher at the International Water Management Institute.

India’s alarming water shortages are now real as are the prolonged droughts in its central region and on-going apocalyptic flooding in several states. Each disaster leaves its own damaging impact on food production back to back.

Problems in each of the farm, water, and energy sectors are being addressed in India through policies, schemes and innovations but there is a need for greater focus on their interconnectedness to solve real world water, energy and food issues, according to Mukherji who is the coordinating lead author of the water chapter of the 6th Assessment Report team of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Policies for reducing water distress in agriculture, for example, have to focus on all fronts –ensuring that food procurement policies are revised to incentivise low water consuming crops, that agricultural energy policies are tweaked to provide smarter incentives for lower groundwater extraction, and that water policies encourage decentralised solutions like water harvesting and water efficient agriculture,” she says.

And again “solutions for groundwater overexploitation problems are often found in the regions’ energy policies, including in the ever-increasing potential of renewable energy,” Mukherji says.

In India and other middle and low income economies, women are stewards of family food security. Increasingly, off- grid solar power is helping them provide better. A tribal woman feeds a 2 horsepower miller run by rooftop solar at Male Mahadeshwara Hills in Southern Karnataka. Courtesy: SELCO India

Clean energy to the rescue of food producers 

Ravi Naik’s tiny two-acre farm is in Shattigerahalli village in the Western Ghats of India’s southern Karnataka State. If any of his relatives come to visit, they trek through two kilometres of dense forests. Come monsoon, they’d find a formidable hill stream in fierce flow, barring their way. Grid electricity has not reached this remoteness, and the 56-year-old small farmer had no choice but to grow the Areca nut which requires less water but also fetches low prices at market.

Naik wanted to grow the remunerative banana but there was no way he could afford the extra irrigation with his kerosene-fed pump which already cost him over seven dollars a month.

But one day he encountered a solar technician from SELCO India, a local solar energy enterprise in Karnataka, who was installing an inverter. Naik narrated his woe. SELCO scouted and found a perennial pond close enough for a small ½ horsepower solar-powered pump to sufficiently draw irrigation for Naik’s banana plants.

Not only did Naik’s income double, thus easing his pump loan payments, the nutritious fruit always grows in abundance and has become his three-year-old grandson’s favourite snack. 

His farm is self sufficient and “clean” now. He no longer dreads the fossil fuel price swings on the black market, where he previously was forced to purchase fuel from.

To break the nexus Mathur suggests, “the promotion of energy efficient solar pumps, together with the purchase of excess electricity by the grid (from mini-grids), provides an opportunity to install micro-irrigation facilities, to mitigate climate emissions and provides a revenue stream for farmers to invest further in technology …energy efficiency is the first-step in ensuring that solar-based electrification is cost effective”. Mathur was recently appointed to the new International Energy Agency’s Commission for Urgent Action on Energy Efficiency.

While science and innovation have much to offer for water, energy and food security, these must be backed by institutional policies and political leadership to identify pathways to overcome a plethora of inter-connected challenges, according to Mukherji.

A 10 mega watt solar power plant set atop irrigation canals in Vodadara, Gujarat provides clean energy to thousands of farmers in the western Indian state. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

Dire consequences already on us 

The World Resources Institute‘s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas released last week clearly indicates that India’s policies are not geared for current challenges it is already facing. The Atlas ranks India 13 among 17 countries that are facing “extremely high” water stress, almost close to Day Zero conditions. The research warns that potentially dire consequences can be triggered more often in India even during short dry shocks when demand outstrips supply, owing to its population which is three times that of the remaining 16 countries on the stressed list.

“South Asia is one of the world’s most highly populated regions with high levels of poverty and malnutrition alongside its rapid economic development. It is also a global hotspot due to huge demands for food, water and energy in a context of severe climate change impacts,” says Jim Woodhill of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

“From experience we know that food (and water) insecurity can be a trigger to societal unrest and even revolution. In such a populous region (as South Asia) it is critical that socially just and environmentally sustainable solutions are found to the challenge that the water, food, energy and climate nexus presents,” says Woodhill, who is the Food Systems Advisor for South Asia Sustainable Development Investment Portfolio at DFAT. 

Woodhill’s stand on South Asia was backed by United Nations findings in 2014. The U.N. had warned the Indian sub-continent may face the brunt of the water crisis where India would be at the centre of this conflict due to its unique geographical position in South Asia. It indicated shared river basins in the region may pit India against Pakistan, China and Bangladesh over the issue of water sharing by 2050. Indus River, Ganges and Brahmaputra basins are crucial for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China.

Already river water sharing between several Indian States is seeing prolonged disputes both legal and political.

“Systems of weak governance are at the heart of the problem. A focus on generating and distributing wealth is no longer enough – we must add the dimension of how to respond to climate change. Science, new forms of decision making, and citizen engagement must go hand in hand,” says Woodhill adding, “Experience worldwide is showing how competition for land and water resources is intensifying, driven by increased demand from agriculture, the energy sector and industry. In South Asia the potential scale of the human tragedy of not moving fast enough down a path of sustainability and climate resilience, is immense.” 

Australia’s Crawford Fund annual conference in Canberra over Aug. 12-13 examines the available evidence as to whether the “storm” is still on track to happen. Or whether scientific, engineering and agricultural innovation the world over, and progress in the farmer’s field in India and in other vulnerable countries, have indeed lessened or delayed the impact of the unsustainable nexus between agriculture, water, energy and climate change.

The Great Ruaha River is completely dry for three months at a stretch. Credit: Thomas Kruchem/IPS

By Orton Kiishweko
DAR ES SALAAM, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

Avelina Elias Mkenda, a 52-year-old small-scale farmer in the Mbarali district of Tanzania’s southwestern Mbeya region, can sense a change in her environment.

A resident of the Great Ruaha River basin, she has never had trouble watering her crops and livestock.

But over the last few years, the river has been delivering less and less of the precious resource; the grass that was once plentiful is now scarce, leaving cattle hungry, while production of coffee, the region’s prize crop, has plummeted.

Referred to as Tanzania’s “ecological backbone”, the Great Ruaha River originates in the Kipengere mountains and stretches roughly 84,000 kilometres, flowing through the wetlands of the Usangu Valley and the Ruaha National Park, eventually emptying into the Rufiji River.

Its basin catchment area waters a massive expanse of the Tanzanian countryside. Over a million small-scale farmers produce a significant portion of the country’s food on the lush soil in the Ruaha basin, which also provides 70 percent of Tanzania’s hydroelectric power, according to government sources.

But officials from the Rufiji Water Basin Office (RWBO), which administers the Ruaha basin, along with academics from Tanzania’s leading Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), are now warning that the river is under “alarming stress”.

“The river has been drying up for lengthy periods of three months (at a stretch), up from the short period of three weeks,” Damian Gabagambi, an agricultural economist at SUA, told IPS. He believes the crisis is largely due to an increasing number of farmers diverting the river for irrigation purposes.

“Prior to 1993 the river was never dry,” Andrew Temu, an SUA professor, told IPS, adding that the three-month-long dry spells began in 1999. In this time period, river basin inhabitants increased from three to six million people.

“With the increasing population, there is a corresponding demand for more water,” he said. Intensive grazing and deforestation have also contributed to the looming crisis.

Furthermore, a lack of proper irrigation infrastructure means that much of the water goes to waste, Gabagambi added.

RWBO Community Development Officer David Muginya told IPS that agricultural projects by both large and small-scale farmers have failed to honour the 2009 Water Resources Management Act, which obliges all water users to deploy proper infrastructure in order to avoid waste.

A 2012 University of Dar es Salaam report released last July, ‘Vulnerability of People’s Livelihoods to Water Resources Availability in Semi Arid Areas of Tanzania’, found that water wastage is also making the one million people dependent on the water resources downstream of the Great Ruaha River extremely vulnerable to an acute water shortage.

All the signs suggest that the current management of natural resources is unsustainable and could result in irreparable damage to the environment.

“The situation has been endangering the lives of millions of people living in south-central Tanzania, who are at risk of growing poorer if the environment is left in a dilapidated state,” Gabagambi warned. Experts believe the impact on agriculture and food production will extend far beyond the immediate vicinity of the river basin, affecting a huge portion of Tanzania’s 46 million people.

RWBO officials, meanwhile, are concerned about the future of the country’s hydroelectricity supply.

Who is to blame?

Large-scale agriculturalists in the region, who say they have plans to build adequate irrigation infrastructure, charge that smaller farmers access water channels illegally and should be made to pay for their water use.

Managing director of the Kilombero Sugar Company Limited, Don Carter Brown, told IPS that small-scale farmers “stress the water resources because they are all farming and illegally drawing water without paying for these rights.”

But small farmers like Mkenda, from the Mbarali district, say they have no choice.

With changing weather patterns, more intensive sun and now a shortage of river water, her coffee crop has suffered, resulting in even lower income. “We do not have the money to put (irrigation infrastructure) in place,” she lamented.

Ironically, it is these small farmers that will be most affected by the water shortage as they struggle to eke out a living beside a dying river.

Other experts like Bariki Kaale, an environmental and energy specialist with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), blame the problem on “mankind’s destruction of water sources”.

He said the Ruaha basin used to have a plentiful water supply until all the trees were felled.

His opinion is substantiated by the findings of a report submitted to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-Tanzania on the causes of biodiversity loss in the Ruaha catchment area, which stated, “Locals (from the) Makete District believe tree plantations (especially various species of cypress and eucalyptus) are associated with the environmental degradation that is taking place in this area.

“Due to excessive tree felling for timber, some of the areas have been cleared and exposed to erosion agents. Tree felling for timber and logs has also contributed to widespread deforestation in the area leading to soil erosion and siltation in the rivers,” the report added.

“We now don’t have water for hydropower (and) we will have no water for drinking in the near future,” the U.N. specialist warned.

(END)