The expansion towards the mountains of the coastal city of Ensenada, in the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California, stresses the water supply, which is scarce in this peninsular region due to its arid nature and deficiencies in water management. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
ENSENADA, Mexico , Jun 21 2023 (IPS)

At the entrance to the coastal city of Ensenada in the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California a sign reads: “Every drop matters to us. Take care of the water.”

The message is important, as the city faces shortages due to hoarding by agricultural producers and builders, as well as the drought that has become more severe because of the effects of the climate emergency.

But cities such as Ensenada, which has a population of 443,000 and is located 2,883 kilometers from Mexico City, do not take sufficient advantage of the reuse of water, a technique that along with other measures can contribute to the fight against the water shortage at a time when Mexico is suffering from intense drought and an unusual heat wave."There is enough water, but there is hoarding. We consume a lot. It is a question of management. Consumption can be moderated, there are experiences around the world in this regard." -- Adrián González

Independent expert Adrián González said a conventional focus on obtaining water that ignores improvements in its use continues to prevail.

“There is enough water, but there is hoarding. We consume a lot. It is a question of management. Consumption can be moderated, there are experiences around the world in this regard,” he told IPS.

Demand exceeds supply, and supply cuts and overexploited sources dry up the water supply. The delivery and sale of water in “pipas” or tanker trucks is a common sight in Ensenada, located in an arid region between the Pacific Ocean and the mountains.

Due to the overexploitation of the aquifers and the growing demand, Ensenada is suffering from a deficit, so long-term solutions are urgently needed.

Consumption stands at about 1,000 liters per second (l/s), which should increase to about 1,260 in 2030, while supply totals about 800 l/s, according to the State Water Commission, the government agency responsible for water resource management in Baja California, on the peninsula of the same name, bordering the United States.

While installed capacity and treatment are on the rise, a widespread problem lies in the historical lack of efficiency and maintenance of facilities, which limits the scope of the available technologies.

In 2021, coverage reached 67.5 percent of the wastewater generated and collected in the municipal sewage systems of this Latin American country, just a few tenths more than the previous year, according to data from the National Water Commission (Conagua).

Treated water can be used for agricultural irrigation, gardening, domestic and industrial uses, and can help recharge aquifers.

Local water agencies can undertake aquifer recharge projects, but incentives for doing so are needed. In fact, the legal framework does not stipulate recovery rights for reused water, which falls under the general jurisdiction of Conagua.

The El Naranjo municipal treatment plant in the city of Ensenada, in the northwestern peninsular state of Baja California, is operating below its installed capacity, which is further affecting the distribution of scarce water in the city. CREDIT: Conagua

Mexico, with a population of 128 million inhabitants spread over an area of 1.96 million square kilometers, is facing increasing water stress, ranking 24th among the countries in the world with this phenomenon, caused by overexploitation, pollution, scarcity and inequity in access to water.

In 2021, 2,872 water reuse plants were operating in Mexico – three percent more than the previous year-, with an installed capacity of 198,603 l/s and a treated flow of 145,341 l/s, just 0.5 percent above the 2020 level.

The northern state of Sinaloa has the largest number of plants (311), followed by Durango also in the north (241) and neighboring Chihuahua (195). Despite their water needs, those with the smallest number of plants are the southeastern state of Campeche and the northern state of Coahuila (27 each), which furthermore operate below capacity.

There are 44 plants operating in Baja California, with an installed capacity of 7692 l/s and a performance of 6222. At the same time, 14 of the 48 groundwater reservoirs in the state, including the Ensenada reservoir, suffer shortages because annual extraction exceeds renewal.

Regional and federal authorities have resorted to seawater desalination in the state, but it only refines about 130 l/s, out of a capacity of 250.

Martín Zepeda, founder of the non-governmental Citizens’ Water Commission, criticized the measures applied so far in the reuse of water.

“We have only achieved palliative measures. We have been suffering from the same problems for 30 years,” he stressed.

The coastal city of Ensenada in the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California depends on aquifer extraction, seawater desalination and the transfer of water from the state of Tijuana, also on the U.S. border, as not enough water is reused. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Baby steps

In another northern state, in the east, Nuevo León, reuse is showing signs of success, but more progress is needed.

Antonio Hernández, a researcher with the non-governmental organization Pronatura Noreste, stressed to IPS the need for treated water infrastructure.

“We don’t have a sufficient network to distribute the treated water available. In 2022, when the water shortage crisis began, the agency responsible instructed the municipalities to buy treated water and thus take pressure off the groundwater,” he told IPS from Monterrey, Nuevo León’s capital.

“The transfer was to be by truck. But it did not happen, because the municipalities did not buy the water nor did the government build the distribution network. Availability does not mean accessibility,” he said.

In 2022, Nuevo León, especially greater Monterrey with a population of more than five million people, faced a severe water crisis.

As a result, the authorities resorted to supply cuts, rate hikes, anti-waste fines and awareness campaigns on water usage.

In that state, 13 of the 24 aquifers are overexploited, including the one outside of Monterrey proper.

The population of Monterrey drinks about 16,000 l/s, which results in a deficit of about 3,000 l/s. That means the 56 treatment plants are insufficient, managing 12,387 l/s, compared to an installed capacity of 16,162 l/s.

Mexico does not take sufficient advantage of wastewater reuse, which can be used to recharge aquifers, for consumption in industrial facilities, for agricultural irrigation or for urban use. Pictured is a fountain in a park in a neighborhood in south-central Mexico City. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Half-hearted measures

Despite the problems faced by the plants, the Federal Attorney General’s Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa) only inspected four municipal facilities, most of them private, in 2016 in Baja California, where it found “minor irregularities” and charged fines in three, according to a public information request filed by IPS.

In Mexico City, only two were inspected – in 2018 and in 2022 – and minor irregularities were found in one private municipal plant, although it was not fined. In 2018, Profepa visited four plants in Nuevo León in which it found minor irregularities.

In total, Profepa inspected a total of 330 plants, including 50 in the western state of Jalisco and 33 in the northern state of Chihuahua. Of that total, it found minor irregularities in 234, and none in 69.

Focus on pipes and little else

The generalized view is the conventional one of promoting the construction of infrastructure to face the crisis, without addressing the scarcity of water resources.

The current Mexican government boasts that it is promoting 15 water projects, such as the construction of dams, aqueducts and treatment plants, mainly in the north of the country to combat the crisis.

In places like Ensenada, the outlook is no different.

Over the next few years, the State Water Commission foresees the expansion of the desalination plant, the modernization of an aqueduct, the rehabilitation of five treatment plants, the delivery of treated water to the agricultural zone, and the rehabilitation of pumping plants and wells.

Despite the situation, the Baja California state government is just now drafting its water plan for the 2022-2027 period.

In Nuevo León, authorities announced the digging of more wells, the construction of the Libertad dam, the El Cuchillo II Aqueduct and four treatment plants, as well as the modulation of pressure to reduce waste.

The Libertad dam will have a capacity of 1,500 l/s, at a cost of some 350 million dollars. Meanwhile, the aqueduct will transport 5,000 l/s, thanks to an investment of some 495 million dollars.

Mexico has also benefited from international financing for water projects. Since 1997, the North American Development Bank has financed 27 water and sanitation projects in Baja , in addition to three in Nuevo León since 2001.

The Norte treatment plant in the Mexican state of Nuevo León seeks to promote water reuse for automobile assembly, urban and agricultural activities in an area that experienced a severe water crisis in 2022. CREDIT: Conagua

Its financing of a 6.8 million dollar wastewater management initiative in the city of Mexicali is currently under public consultation.

In addition, the U.S.-Mexico binational financial institution is backing the issue of a 150 million dollar green bond for water projects.

The experts consulted proposed several measures, such as awareness campaigns, water reuse, and leak repair.

González, the independent expert, said the combination of reuse and efficiency offers very low costs and promising results.

“There is not going to be just one single solution. Fate is going to catch up with us. We can’t continue following strategies that have never worked and that have been exhausted,” he argued.

Zepeda, the water activist, also suggested the creation of a citizen water commission to audit the operation of the system.

“The situation is not going to improve until availability and uses are corrected. It is a combination of water sources and activities. We need long-term solutions,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hernández the researcher proposed a revision of zoning and land use plans to address the construction of neighborhoods, golf courses and vehicle assembly plants, to promote the efficient use of water.

The conflict in Syria has destroyed much of the country’s water infrastructure, leaving five million people suffering from a critical water shortage. Credit: Bigstock

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 26 2015 (IPS)

Imagine having to venture out into a conflict zone in search of water because rebel groups and government forces have targeted the pipelines. Imagine walking miles in the blazing summer heat, then waiting hours at a public tap to fill up your containers. Now imagine realizing the jugs are too heavy to carry back home.

This scene, witnessed by an engineer with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is becoming all too common in embattled Syria. In this case, the child sent to fetch water was a little girl who simply sat down and cried when it became clear she wouldn’t be able to get the precious resource back to her family.

Compounded by a blistering heat wave, with temperatures touching a searing 40 degrees Celsius in the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s water shortage is reaching critical levels, the United Nations said Wednesday.

In an Aug. 26 press relief, UNICEF blasted parties to the conflict for deliberately targeting the water supply, adding that it has recorded 18 intentional water cuts in Aleppo in 2015 alone.

Such a move – banned under international law – is worsening the misery of millions of war-weary civilians, with an estimated five million people enduring the impacts of long interruptions to their water supply in the past few months.

“Clean water is both a basic need and a fundamental right, in Syria as it is anywhere else,” Peter Salama, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement today. “Denying civilians access to water is a flagrant violation of the laws of war and must end.”

In some communities taps have remained dry for up to 17 consecutive days; in others, the dry spell has lasted over a month.

Often times the task of fetching water from collection points or public taps falls to children. It is not only exhausting work, but exceedingly dangerous in the conflict-ridden country. UNICEF says that three children have died in Aleppo in recent weeks while they were out in search of water.

In cities like Aleppo and Damascus, as well as the southwestern city of Dera’a, families are forced to consume water from unprotected and unregulated groundwater sources. Most likely contaminated, these sources put children at risk of water-borne diseases like typhoid and diarrhoea.

With supply running so low and demand for water increasing by the day, water prices have shot up – by 3,000 percent in places like Aleppo – making it even harder for families to secure this life-sustaining resource.

Ground fighting and air raids have laid waste much of the country’s water infrastructure, destroying pumping stations and severing pipelines at a time when municipal workers cannot get in to make necessary repairs.

To top it off, the all-too-frequent power cuts prevent technicians and engineers from pumping water into civilian areas.

UNICEF has trucked in water for over half-a-million people, 400,000 of them in Aleppo. The agency has also rehabilitated 94 wells serving 470,000 people and distributed 300,000 litres of fuel to beef up public water distribution systems in Aleppo and Damascus, where the shortage has impacted 2.3 million and 2.5 million people respectively. In Dera’a, a quarter of a million people are also enduring the cuts.

A 40-billion-dollar funding gap is preventing UNICEF from revving up its water, hygiene and sanitation operations around Syria. To tackle the crisis in Aleppo and Damascus alone the relief agency says it urgently needs 20 million dollars – a request that is unlikely to be met given the funding shortfall gripping humanitarian operations across the U.N. system.

Overall, water availability in Syria is about half what it was before 2011, when a massive protest movement against President Bashar al-Assad quickly turned into a violent insurrection that now involves over four separate armed groups including the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Well into its fifth year, the war shows no sign of abating.

As the U.N. marks World Water Week (Aug. 23-28) its eyes are on the warring parties in Syria who must be held accountable for using water to achieve their military and political goals.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Jasmine Omeke and Mariel Borgman of the University of Michigan survey an abandoned lot on the east side of Detroit. Unpaid bills are often converted to liens against properties. Credit: University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment/cc by 2.0

By Patricia Jones
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, Oct 24 2014 (IPS)

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation Catarina de Albuquerque and Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha were in Detroit, Michigan Oct. 17-20.

What they saw and heard in a city struggling to emerge from historic bankruptcy were mass water shutoffs and conditions they described as “a perfect storm.” The U.N. experts issued a call for a national affordability standard that would protect the poorest and most vulnerable.The city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and nations worldwide are on the cusp of making decisions that will lock generations to come into trillions of dollars of water and sanitation infrastructure investments, requiring staggering increases in water rates to households, small businesses and communities.

After speaking to hundreds of consumers, local authorities, and City of Detroit water and sewerage utility staff, the U.N. experts reported the scale and impacts of the shutoffs as unprecedented in their experience.

Freedom of information act responses from the City of Detroit showed that in 2014, 27,500 water shutoffs took place. The utility was not able to say how many persons were affected, how many residences were vacant, nor the impacts of the mass water shut off programme.

How could this be? This was the United States. This was Detroit — in previous years, one of the nation’s thriving manufacturing cities. As the third largest water and sanitation public service provider in the United States, Detroit’s utility serves 40 percent of the state of Michigan’s population, similar to large urban utilities around the world.

The City of Detroit, the state of Michigan and nations worldwide are on the cusp of making decisions that will lock generations to come into trillions of dollars of water and sanitation infrastructure investments requiring staggering increases in water rates to households, small businesses and communities.

Detroit is the tipping point, and the lesson we must learn. Water is the great equaliser. Everyone must have access to survive.

Water availability, quality and affordability are increasingly global issues, in developing and developed countries and particularly within major urban areas like Detroit. More than half the world’s population now lives in a city.

The United States is similar to other countries in terms of urban water and sanitation service challenges, but unique for a few important reasons. First, the U.S. can bring economic resources to bear to solve these issues that are beyond the capacities of most developing countries.

Of equal importance, U.S. technical expertise and policy framework are well developed.

That said, the United States is also unique in problematic aspects. There are unintended consequences of a water shutoff in the U.S. Unpaid bills are often converted to liens against properties, and homes are being foreclosed upon as a result of unpaid water and sewerage bills.

In Detroit and other cities, tenants who have no control over upkeep of properties they are renting are burdened with escalating water bills due to unrepaired leaks. Residences can be condemned for unsanitary conditions.

Most disturbing, water shutoff is a de facto sign of neglect: by law, children may be removed from the custodial care of their parents and placed in state care.

In the U.S., due to the legacy of racial discrimination of the past and the legacy of poverty resulting from racial discrimination, the demographics of consumers negatively impacted by increasing water rates and shutoff programs are single female head of households, children, the disabled, the elderly and people of color.

In terms of urban water issues specifically, the United States shares with other countries significant gaps in understanding the contours of the problem– and in our policy framework to address it.

In the U.S., we do not know the extent of the problem or who is impacted. Neither health officials, utilities, local, state or federal governments are required to collect data. Nor do we have in place sufficient programmes to address the problem of lack of access by the poorest and most vulnerable.

There are few, if any, existing official data sources on the impact of water shutoffs. No utility in the U.S. — including Detroit — is required to assess a household before shutting off water service, to report on shutoffs with demographic data, or to assess the public health implications of shutoffs for children, elderly, disabled or chronically ill — precisely those for whom a water shutoff poses an extraordinary burden.

Fortunately, some states have adopted protections for certain populations against water shutoffs. In New England, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island prohibit water shutoffs to households with infants less than 12 months of age up to children under two years of age.

Some states and utilities have provisions for persons with chronic illness to delay a water shutoff with a medical certification.

These practices, along with their rate implications, should be researched as best practices and expanded.

Many Western democracies ban water shutoffs completely, including France, Great Britain, Russia, Ireland, Scotland and, most recently, Ecuador. Courts in Belgium and the Netherlands have found that water shutoffs violate human rights.

The U.S. and other countries can study how service providers in these countries use other collection procedures and affordability protections to ensure their own financial sustainability while still ensuring water access for lowest income consumers.

Where oversight is weak or non-existent at state or city levels, or where political conditions no longer afford the checks and balances of a two-party system, national governments must have a role, give guidance, and monitor water availability, quality and affordability, to ensure basic constitutional protections.

Constitutional protections must include due process, representation and continuing service for both disputed bills and low income consumers, while making arrangements for an affordable payment plan.

21st century challenges will add the overlay of increasingly more difficult environmental issues. What will define us is how we as a nation and as a world community respond to drought, flooding, water shortages, water contamination — and ensuring access to water as a human right.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Three boys in the Moqattam area look out over Cairo, the growing population of which is rapidly depleting already scarce water resources. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS.

By Shelly Kittleson
CAIRO, Feb 6 2014 (IPS)

Heavy reliance on water intensive crops, a major upstream dam project for the Nile basin, and rising groundwater levels pushing at pharaoh-era monuments will be pressing issues for the next Egyptian president – whether military or civilian.

As criticism continues over the military’s heavy-handedness to quell protests, little attention is being given to the late January announcement by Egypt’s minister of irrigation and water resources on the growing severity of the country’s water shortage: share of water per citizen stands at 640 cubic metres, compared with an international standard of 1,000.

The minister said he expected this amount to decrease to 370 cubic metres by 2050 due to a rapidly growing population.“Many people need to start measuring how much water they use, but it’s hard to break traditions here.”

A scientist working in the water resources sector expressed cautious hope to IPS that “the military is one of the few institutions that can actually get things done.” But he added: “That said, they were in power for a long time and didn’t do anything.”

Improving irrigation practices and countering the demographic explosion are some of the most commonly cited actions to be considered, as well as reducing the use of pesticides and improving sewage and waste disposal systems to prevent contaminating the limited water supplies available.

Attempting to lessen the population’s consumption of sugar would also be beneficial, experts say, not only in terms of water supplies but also public health.

Hugely popular juice pressed from water-intensive sugarcane can be found on street corners across Egypt, with inhabitants swearing by its “kidney-cleansing” properties. Ubiquitous coffee and tea gets steeped in sugar.

Diabetes levels have risen by 83 percent over the past 15 years, but little attempt is made to inform the public of the health-related risks or stem the preponderance of sugarcane production.

Egypt’s agriculture sector consumes well over 80 percent of the country’s annual water resources and sugarcane accounts for a large portion, alongside rice and cotton.

Rice production has been banned by the government in some areas for its heavy water requirements, though it commands a high price on the international market, is a staple for the population, and a certain quantity helps control soil salinity and limits saltwater intrusion in the Delta.

Egypt is instead the world’s largest importer of wheat and buys over half of its requirements from abroad, much of which goes into subsidised bread for the quarter of its 84 million people who live below the poverty line of 1.65 dollars a day.

A serious issue is that outdated irrigation practices are still in use, Hussein Jeffrey John Gawad, a hydro-geologist working as a consultant in Egypt, told IPS.

“Because there was always an abundance of water before, they just continue flooding the farms,” he said. “Many people need to start measuring how much water they use, but it’s hard to break traditions here.”

In certain areas of the country, it is instead an excess of water that is causing problems. The most traditional face of Egypt to the world – and its main magnet for tourism, a sector that accounted for more than a tenth of Egypt’s GDP prior to the 2011 uprising – may be in danger as well, Gawad noted, due to rising groundwater around the country’s ancient monuments.

As the population swells, agriculture increasingly encroaches on areas near important monuments, bringing with it artificial irrigation channels to which chemical fertilisers are added, thereby increasing salinity levels and seeping into limestone foundations, weakening them.

A rise in the water table around the Osireion – the only remaining visible tomb in Abydos, one of Egypt’s most important archaeological sites – has made it largely inaccessible due to inundation of sand and flooding.

Gawad said that at one point the government had tried to install a “dewatering” system, “but now there is literally zero government attention to this.”

At some sites, pumps and drainage pipes have been set up, with varying levels of success. An international rescue effort led by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in the 1960s saved the enormous blocks of the Abu Simbel temples from being submerged by relocating them onto an artificial hill during the construction of the Aswan Dam.

However, the more gradual but relentless weakening of temple foundations and steady erosion of carvings and ancient paintings has not drawn similar attention.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s diversion of the Blue Nile as part of its massive Renaissance Dam project looms large over any discussion of Egypt’s future water supplies.

As part of colonial-era agreements, Egypt long held rights to the vast majority of the Nile’s waters. In mid-2010, however, five upstream countries – Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda, with Burundi joining in the following year – signed a treaty to share the dam’s resources, formally launching the project in April 2012.

“Ethiopia has the right to use the water flowing through their lands,” Gawad said, “but the policy of the Egyptian government is to not grant them that right. They stick by colonial-era mandates when it is convenient, and throw them by the wayside when it is not.”

A study by the International Fund for Agricultural Development found in 2005 that 98 percent of Egyptian agriculture was irrigated with Nile water or pumped from aquifers renewed by the Nile River flow. Under former president Mohammed Morsi, there was talk of “going to war” if the dam project were to be completed, but officials have since said this option has been ruled out.

Journalists have been arrested for questioning the merits and funding of the dam in Ethiopia, and the country shows no willingness to consider alternative options. Few reliable studies have been carried out on the potential effects of the project, but reducing the amount of water flowing into the water-strapped nation further downstream will inevitably pose risks to its economy and, as a result, its stability.

As Zimbabwe struggles with water supply because of a shortage of water treatment chemicals, businesses have sprung up all over the country with people illegally selling water obtained from, sometimes, unsafe sources. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE, Jun 9 2013 (IPS)

For 61-year-old Sarah Chikwanha from water-starved Chitungwiza, a town about 25 kilometres outside Harare, Zimbabwe, there is no choice. She must buy her water from illegal water traders, whose businesses have sprung up across the country.

“We only have water once weekly in Chitungwiza, and so I have no choice but to buy from dealers at 95 dollars for a 2,500-litre tank,” Chikwanha told IPS.

These new, illegal businesses are the result of the dire need for water, as rationing in towns and cities continues because of shortages of water treatment chemicals in this southern African nation.

Harare’s mayor, Muchadeyi Masunda, has gone on record saying that the council needs three million dollars a month for water treatment chemicals, a challenge compounded by the city’s obligation to supply water to neighbouring towns like Chitungwiza, Norton, and Ruwa.

Statistics from the Harare Residents Trust (HRT), an advocacy group, indicate that only 192,000 households in Harare are connected to the water system, while the rest depend on boreholes or rainwater.

Harare needs 1,300 megalitres of water daily, but the current supply ranges from 600 to 700 megalitres.

Councillors from Chitungwiza, where Chikwanha lives, told IPS that the council there failed to pay for water supplied by Harare’s Lake Chivero, thus intensifying water rationing in a town of nearly two million people. People have now turned to wells, streams and inadequate boreholes, as well as illegal traders, for their water.

“Water shortages have been going on for over a decade now, dating back to the beginning of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis around 2000, when revenue collection dwindled after commercial farmers who used to contribute faithfully to paying water bills were evicted from their farms,” a top council official in Harare told IPS on condition of anonymity.

Panganayi Charumbira, a councillor from Harare’s Budiriro low-income suburb, told IPS that both Zimbabwe’s urban and rural areas were affected. “The water crisis is getting worse in towns, but it’s even worse in the countryside,” Charumbira said.

But the water traders say that despite the worsening water woes, they find it hard for their operations to be regularised. “We sell water illegally here because council authorities are not willing to licence us, accusing us of trading in contaminated water,” Delisono Jamela, a water trader in Harare who runs an unregistered water-selling company called Jame-Waters, told IPS.

Donemore Siwela, who runs Sycamore-Oasis, another unregistered water-selling company, acknowledged that he pilfers tap water from strategic places that are not experiencing water rationing.

“My company is well connected to hospitals and politically-influential authorities here housed at government buildings, from which I draw water. Nothing happens to me even if I’m caught,” Siwela told IPS.

But according to Zimbabwe’s Water Bill of 1998, a licence to use water is issued by a responsible local authority, to which a prospective user must apply. The Standards Association of Zimbabwe (SAZ) in November 2012 intensified the monitoring of water-selling companies amid revelations that other water dealers were not meeting required standards, according to SAZ director general Eve Gadzikwa.

“We engaged the regulator, who in this case is the Food Standards Advisory Board (FSAB), for updates on water quality,” Gadzikwa told IPS. FSAB is the regulatory board tasked with making random checks on the quality and safety of water for domestic and commercial use in Zimbabwe.

Harare City Council spokesperson Lesley Gwindi accused water traders of jeopardising public health. “Water traders are fuelling the spread of waterborne diseases by selling untreated water, and as council, we are doing everything within our capacity to ensure that everyone gets a fair share of clean water,” Gwindi told IPS.

However, Dr. Portia Manangazira, director of the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare’s Department of Epidemiology and Disease Control, told IPS that cases of waterborne diseases were isolated nationwide.

“Cases of waterborne diseases like typhoid and diarrhoea are, for now, isolated here,” Manangazira said. But more than 4,200 Zimbabweans succumbed to cholera from August 2008 to mid 2009 as contaminated water supplies spread the disease amid the country’s failing health care systems.

Some dealers told IPS that they sourced water from local lakes like Lake Chivero, and they claimed they purified it on their own before selling it to water-starved residents.

“We draw water to sell straight from Lake Chivero, normally at night because we are deemed water poachers by council cops here,” a water dealer said.

Harare’s urbanites like 46-year-old Tracey Mangena, a single mother of five, find the water and tanks purchased from dealers unaffordable. “The tanks cost 750 dollars each before filling them with 2,500 litres of water at 95 dollars, and for me, I can’t afford it as I’m jobless,” she told IPS.

Many other urban dwellers here, dogged by the water crisis, have drilled their own boreholes. And others, like 56-year-old widow Miriam Saungweme from Harare’s Mufakose low-income suburb, have dug unprotected wells. “Poor people like me have had no choice in the face of mounting water woes except to dig wells from which to draw water,” she told IPS.

Meanwhile, the Rooftop Rainwater Harvest, a project established in 2009 by International Relief and Development, a non-governmental organisation, in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development to assist underprivileged people with clean and safe water, has been a source of relief to many during the rainy seasons.

“We enjoy a temporary reprieve from water woes with the help of this rooftop water-harvesting initiative, but with the rainy season over, several of us here have since fallen back to a water crisis, and we are scavenging for the precious liquid from unprotected sources or buying from dealers at four dollars per 20-litre container,” 34-year-old Agnes Mhasi from Harare told IPS.

Women and children in Zimbabwe queue for hours to fetch water from boreholes. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Stanley Kwenda
HARARE, Jan 28 2013 (IPS)

For three weeks Tavonga Kwidini and his wife Maria had no tap water in their home in Glen View, one of the many dry suburbs in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

The couple was just about at the end of their tether when heavy rains came like a gift from the heavens.

“We now harvest rainwater and that’s what we use to bathe, drink and flush our toilets,” Kwidini told IPS as he lined up his buckets underneath the roof of his house in anticipation of the January showers.

Such has been his life since the second week of December 2012, which was the last time he had tap water. Surprisingly, he still receives the council water bill averaging around 80 dollars every month.

“Water problems are not new here — in 2008 some of my neighbours died of cholera because of these shortages but the (city) council is not doing anything to make sure that we have safe household water,” according to Kwidini.

U.N. assistance still needed

In the past the problem was largely blamed on shortages of water treatment chemicals, but for nearly half a decade this excuse has been inadequate, as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) provided these chemicals to the country’s 20 urban councils free of charge.

U.N. assistance came in response to Zimbabwe’s 2008 cholera epidemic that killed about 4,000 people. It was not until last April, when local authorities indicated that the situation was under control, that UNICEF discontinued its support, according to UNICEF Chief Communications Officer Micaela Marques de Sousa.

However, experts and locals agree that the current status quo might force the aid agency to rethink its position, given that access to safe water is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), whose 2015 target is fast approaching.

Until the UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme withdrew in 2008 the situation had improved visibly, with greater numbers of people in Zimbabwe’s 20 urban centres able to access safe water and sanitation services.

Now it is common to see many people in urban Zimbabwe carrying buckets and walking in search of water, a sight that had hitherto been limited to rural areas.

“We have no option but to move from one area to the next in search of boreholes with clean water. These days we are lucky because of the rains, otherwise I would be carrying a 20-litre bucket to my work place to bring drinking water home,” said Kwidini, who works at a wholesale shop in central Harare.

Residents seek alternatives

As with many crises, women and children are shouldering the lion’s share of the burden.

Women who have now resorted to doing their washing in water bodies that are often used as dumping areas by industrial companies are vulnerable to several health hazards.

Meanwhile, children are being forced into the role of “water bearer”.

“My day starts at five a.m. as I join a queue at the local borehole to get bath water for my father, myself and for household use,” fourteen-year-old Thelma told IPS.

Like many of her peers Thelma has to join the long water line early or else she will be late for school.

The number of functioning boreholes is inadequate to service the urban population, and when they break down – a common occurrence – they are often left in a state of disrepair.

A borehole at the Tichagarika Shopping Centre in Glen View suburb, which serviced hundreds of residents, broke down in June last year and remained dormant until its components were stolen.

The government assisted Harare in sinking 250 boreholes across the capital but residents say most of these have either broken down or only provide contaminated water.

According to the Health and Child Welfare Ministry’s disease monitoring report, an estimated 50 typhoid cases are reported each day in Harare and its satellite towns. Roughly 500,000 people in Zimbabwe suffered from diarrhoea in 2012; of these, 460,000 were serious cases and 281 were fatal.

Statistics from an advocacy group, the Harare Residents Trust (HRT), suggest that only 192,000 households in Harare, a city of two million people, are connected to the water system, while the rest depend on boreholes or rainwater.

To make matters worse HRT says the city is losing 60 percent of its treated water to leakages in the old infrastructure. Harare needs 1,300 mega litres of water daily but the current supply per day ranges from 600-700 mega litres, approximately half of the demand.

On top of this, Zimbabwe spends 27 million dollars a month to treat the water supply.

HRT Director Precious Shumba told IPS that the problems facing the city are a sign of local councils’ failure to adequately provide its residents with the most basic services.

“We are most disappointed with the level of service provision — the quality is atrocious and residents are complaining of stomachaches and diarrhoeal diseases like typhoid. Most of the time, the water coming out of taps is smelly and has visible impurities,” said Shumba.

“In areas like Crowborough, Dzivarasekwa and Glen Norah, Budiriro, residents have witnessed sadza (cooked cornmeal) and vegetable particles flowing out of their taps, raising genuine fears of the safety and sustainably of this water for human consumption,” Shumba added.

A recent study from the University of Zimbabwe indicated that one in every 1,000 people in the capital is at risk of developing colon or liver cancer due to continuous consumption of unsafe water pumped from polluted sources.

Christopher Zvobgo, a Harare city engineer, strongly disputed these findings, though he admitted that the city undoubtedly faces water-related challenges.

“We test water on a daily basis and we take samples from different points. Every month we send (the samples) to two independent laboratories for testing and they meet the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard,” he said adding that the biggest problem lies in the aged water infrastructure.

But back in Glen View, residents like Alois Chidoda and his children are forced to rely on boreholes because the water coming out of their tap is “brown in colour” and simply not fit for consumption, he told IPS.

“Using it will be inviting disease,” Chidoda added.

President of the Urban Councils Association of Zimbabwe (UCAZ), Femias Chakabuda, blames the water shortages in the country’s urban areas on mounting government debts.

“The problem is our government wants to use water for free. That makes it impossible for us to repair water infrastructure and pay our own service providers,” he told IPS, adding that the government currently owes Harare City Council over 10 million dollars, Masvingo City Council over seven million dollars and Bulawayo City Council four million dollars in back-payment for water services.

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)