Water, Politics and Africa

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...

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...

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...