Water and Development: Africa

We will step away from the Northern African context for this blog post. Instead, we will be looking at water narratives in the south. Cape Town, South Africa’s capital is projected to be the first major city in the world to run out of water . The cause of South Africa’s water crisis is unique as the water shortages are not due to the classic high demand and low supply paradox, but due to uneven distribution , politics, poor planning and inefficient crisis management . Although residents are not accountable for the crisis that is consuming South Africa, “ the burden of making sure it doesn’t happen rests largely on our [the South African local’s] ability to cut down on water usage ”. Cape Town bracing for ‘ day zero ’ (the day where the city has no more running water) is a middle-class crisis that made news headlines in 2018. However, many other Townships, namely black townships have long suffered water shortages and have been living in ‘day zero’ for years .   South Africa relies on

Making sure that freshwater is globally and widely accessible remains one of humanity’s biggest challenge . South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation after gaining independence from Sudan in 2011 . The young nation experiences flooding for over half of the year, has the White Nile passing through it and sits on 3 transboundary aquifers - it is not short on water. However, civil war has ensued the country, where they have faced several humanitarian crises: 80% of South Sudan’s population is without access to clean water. Civil unrest has nominally ‘ended’, but water now stands at the core for the increase in violent and less-than human acts of kidnappings and rape .   Due to the ensuing violence, infrastructure key to delivering clean, safe water has been destroyed through acts of political violence. In a warming climate, clean water is becoming more essential to our lives, and the drive to secure it has lead to armed political conflicts and statements between the different ethnic

There are actually two dams at Aswan, the Aswan Low Dam (ALD) and the Aswan High Dam (AHD), but generally when people talk about the Aswan Dam they are referring to the latter.   95% of Egypt’s population lives within the narrow strip along the Nile and there goes a saying that ‘ Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt ’. Historically, the Egyptians have been taking advantage of the annual flooding as the Nile brings nutrients needed to fertilise the soil for irrigation. However, as the population grew, the flooding became a hazard and in response, the ALD was built in the late 1800s by the British whilst Egypt was under British colonial rule. The ALD was deemed inadequate in controlling the floods and in response, the AHD was constructed in 1968, where it was deemed as an ‘ important hydro-political act ’ that will essentially act as an agent for economic development. The flow of the Nile is increasingly becoming unnatural with the construction of hard engineering solutions, and t

With water appreciating in value, in 1979, former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat claimed that the only reason for Egypt to go to war was over water . The following decade, former Egyptian UN Secretary warned that the wars to come would be over the waters of the Nile . It is becoming clear that water as a means to obtain national security is becoming a priority for many riparian states of the Nile. In this blog post, I will talk about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), and the subsequent political relations Ethiopia has with the riparian states of the Nile. The Nile passes through eleven riparian countries: Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan,, Sudan, and finally Egypt before it empties out into the Mediterranean. Due to the Nile’s transboundary borders, many political issues brew and perhaps one of the most well known disputes on the river is between Egypt and Ethiopia. When Ethiopia announced their int

Welcome to this blog!   I wanted to introduce the theme for my blog in this introductory post 'Water and Politics in Africa', and the significance of it to the discipline.   Imagine someplace hot with vast savanna's that are filled up with herd animals and scrawny starving people. Yes you are correct, I was describing Africa. We often associate the continent as a single nation, where foreign entities implement a 'one fix for all' solution when solving the issues regarding water, and Wainaina's article on 'How to Write About Africa' is a truly engaging, comical and satirical piece, covering common stereotypes of the continent. The terminology used when writing about Africa has strong colonial roots, and misconceptions about the continent are ever-present in both academic and popular discourse. In strict economic terms, Africa is the poorest region with the lowest proportions of national populations with access to safe water, making it an interesting loca