Facts and Numbers

Before starting to understand what the best way for Africa to progress into the future regarding the use of its water is, we must understand the past and especially the current situation there. Therefore, I will try to answer the following questions in this post, focusing to an extent on Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, who are hopfully quite representative for other countries in Africa:

How much water is used in Africa? What is it used for? Who owns this water?

Numbers and statistics

For data on domestic water use for the average consumer, the 1972 book Drawers ofWater by Gilbert F. White, David J. Bradley and Anne U. White and its sequel 2001 Drawers of Water II by John Thompson et al. provide much useful information on the changes in domestic water consumption in East Africa. The authors of the original Drawers of Water picked 16 sites in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and recorded various statistics on domestic water usage for inhabitants of all economic backgrounds. The 2001 edition then revisited these sites and gave updates on these statistics, allowing a comparison between conditions in the late 60s and late 90s.

The research paints a gloomy picture of progress. Mean per capita water use in urban areas has fallen from 98.7 to 54.9 litres per day, present water infrastructure has “declined significantly” (Thompson et al., 2000) with only 20% of piped households having a 24h of water, and time spent collecting water has increased from 27.9 to 91.7 minutes for people living in unpiped households. Also, urban water supply has been significantly affected by the rise of kiosks and vendors, who in 1997 provided water to almost 40% of piped households (ibid), up from zero in 1967.

While conditions were worsening, population increased massively from 36 million to 82 million in the countries these statistics were measured. This growth is not predicted to stop, with Sub-Saharan Africa experiencing the highest urbanisation rate in the world for the foreseeable future, and while at the moment ~35% of Africans live in urban conditions, this is set to rise to 50% by 2040. (DosSantos et al., 2011)

Usage

A good, concise account of what water is used for in Africa is given by Wada et al. (2011). As seen on Figure 1, across the entire continent, 260.4 m³ of water per capita get withdrawn annually, which is significantly lower than the values for Europe (537.8m³) and North America (1307.5m³), and of this a very large proportion (83.1%) is used in agriculture.

	Population in 2000 (millions)	Total Freshwater Withdrawal (km3 yr−1)	Per Capita Withdrawal (m3capita−1 yr−1)	Withdrawal per Sector (%)
				Agriculture	Industry	Domestic
Continents
Africa	818.7	213.2	260.4	83.1	4.3	12.6
Asia	3679.8	2294.8	623.6	84.9	7.2	7.9
Europe	729.2	392.2	537.8	29.3	48.5	22.2
North America	476.1	622.5	1307.5	44.1	33.9	22.0
South America	341.2	164.6	482.4	84.8	6.4	8.8
Oceania	28.7	26.3	916.4	64.9	10.4	24.7
GDP per capita classes
Low income countries	2203.2	1288.2	584.7	86.0	7.7	6.3
Middle income countries	2961.7	1549.4	523.2	69.0	16.1	14.9
High income countries	908.8	875.7	963.6	39.6	39.4	21.0
Global	6073.7	3713.7	611.4	68.6	18.1	13.3

Figure 1: Population and Water Withdrawal by Sector per Continent and Classified by GDP per Capita for the Year 2000, adapted from Wada et al. (2011)

Ownership

According to Thompson et al. (2000), who base their research on data from Drawers of Water I and II, “privatisation of water and health services in East Africa has taken place on a grand scale since the structural adjustment era of the 1980s, but not in ways that fit easily with World Bank or IMF prescriptions.”

Further, “the links between the voluntary sector and the state are becoming more, not less, important for service provision. Significant parts of water and environmental health serives would grind to a halt in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda if voluntary agencies did not have access to state-provided resources” while “donors play a growing political and financial role in the water and health sectors. State services depend increasingly on donor resources.” (ibid)

Thus, ownership of water in the domestic sector has generally been transferred from government and towards more neoliberal market actors, like private companies and the voluntary sector. 

Conclusion

Looking at these facts, many possible questions arise. Who is responsible for the apparent failure of domestic infrastructure in the East African nations? To what extent was the large-scale privatisation of water supply responsible for this, or was it actually failure on governmental side that was at fault? How is continued urbanisation going to affect water supply in the coming years?

According to the examined literature, it appears that ‘privatisation’ is the most widely commented-on issue related to domestic water consumption in Africa. Thus, in next week’s post, I will look at privatisation in more depth, focusing on South Africa as a case study.