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The Implementation Gap, Part II

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...continued from Part I.... (citations by Golooba-Mutebi, 2012 unless otherwise noted) Golooba-Mutebi goes on to list many examples of poor implementation efforts in Uganda and Rwanda, which however can likely be seen as universal problems that occur in many environments with similar conditions. One of these is that both recently expanded institutions and private actors simply lack “the capacity, the experience and the organisational sophistication” for their jobs. District officials, as in Masaka district, are hopelessly overstretched and mismanaged to the point where they frequently give up on carrying out their jobs properly, resulting in a failure to carry out repairs on damaged infrastructure and a lack of supervision of other actors, with cascading effects. Due lack of supervision, government, community and private actors lack the incentive to likewise carry out their function appropriately. In the profit-oriented private sector this is particularly problematic, wher...
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The Implementation Gap, Part I

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Welcome to this last double-post in Water, Politics and Africa , where I will be reflecting on all I have covered so far and relating this to an issue I have not explicitly covered yet, but which I feel might be the most important problem in African domestic water supply management: the implementation gap. Introduction Ownership of domestic water supply in Africa is a strange issue, since it can in many ways be both a massive advantage and a huge burden to the affected party. Thus, any actor involved in controlling water supply has an interest in extracting the largest profit from this control while bearing the smallest cost. Be it government agencies and parties, private corporations, communities and cooperatives, volunteers and NGOs, even academic theorists, all these parties have an interest in influencing how exactly water supply is executed. However, and this has been alluded to in many posts especially regarding the market-government spectrum, a large number of resear...
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Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM)

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Welcome back to  Water, Politics and Africa ! After looking at the role of the community as a separate political entity in my last post, I will now cover the concept of “Integrated Water Resource Management,” including its origin and purpose, advantages and disadvantages, and conclude on its relevance in the debate over control of domestic water supply in Africa.  What is Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM)? As stated in my last post, Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) is roughly defined as “reconciling basic human needs, ensuring access and equity, with economic development and the imperative of ecological integrity, while respecting transboundary commitments” ( van der Zaag, 2005 ) in a “comprehensive and holistic way,” ( Savenije & Van der Zaag, 2008 ) although there is some variation in its exact definition. Also, IWRM is closely linked the ‘Ecosystem Services’ concept popularised by the 2005 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) , with C...
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The Power of the Community

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Welcome back to this latest edition of  Water, Politics and Africa! In my last post I looked into the role of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the flag-bearers for the increased privatisation of domestic water supply in Sub-Saharan Africa. While there is increasing evidence that entities promoting both privatisation and nationalisation are moving towards a more ‘bottom-up’ and community-inclusive approach, neither of them really represent the community, and neither of them are the community. Thus, this week I would like to look at the community as a separate force in the struggle for water, specifically their interests, influence, political power and whether community-led approaches when seen as separate from market- and government-based ones might be superior in providing more affordable water for more people. Community - A Solution where Government and Market fail? In my previous posts I have come to the conclusion that the forces trying to st...
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The World Bank and the IMF

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Welcome back to this edition of  Water, Politics and Africa ! This week I will take a look at the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), two organisations that are deeply involved in many hydrology- and development-related projects in Africa, even though many people know very little about them and their interests. Introduction If you have little idea about what these two institutions are and what exactly they do, then do not worry - most people feel the same. Having immense funds at their disposal and being involved in all sorts of conferences, development programmes and government deals while having close to no public image, to ordinary people they may appear like suspicious shadow organisations that influence all sorts of international developments. World Bank and IMF - What are they? According to the online investment encyclopaedia Investopedia, "The IMF exists primarily to stabilize exchange rates, while the World Bank’s goal is to reduce pov...
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The Privatisation of South Africa’s Water Supply, Part II

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Welcome back to this week’s edition of Water, Politics and Africa where we continue looking into the privatisation of domestic water supply in South Africa, and then compare the results of these policies in South Africa and the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Water Supply Privatisation in Johannesburg, South Africa (continued) The changes Johannesburg Water implemented to how water was supplied and billed in the predominantly black townships meant that many families could simply no longer afford their water. While South Africa was the first country to declare it a constitutional right that every citizen have “sufficient food and water” ( Section 27(1)(b) ), the exact amount was never specified, and therefore an average 8 people per household were assumed when setting the free allowance of 6,000l per month. However, this estimate is far lower than the reality, as Jabu Molobela, a resident of the Soweto township, warns in an interview:   ...
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Documentary: The Future of Water

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Hi everyone,   I just want to make a quick post about a documentary I am watching,  The Future of Water , made by Norwegian geographer Terje Tvedt in 2007. It is divided into three one-hour segments and covers a diverse range of topics all related to the political and economic future of water. There are many case studies on Africa (including water privatisation in Johannesburg!) but also on very different places like Norway, Pakistan, Tibet and the Netherlands. If you want to find out what will happen in the Indus valley when the Himalayan glaciers melt, how Egypt is building a 'second Nile' in the desert, and even how mismanagement of water might have led to the collapse of ancient Mayan civilisation, give it a watch! The documentary is available on Netflix, and you can watch the trailer  here . Source
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