water scarcity in south africa essay

Water Scarcity In South Africa: A Result Of Physical Or Economic Factors?

Introduction

“Water scarcity” refers to the volumetric abundance, or non-abundance, of water supply. It is expressed as the ratio of human water consumption to available water supply in a given area. It is a physical reality that can be measured consistently across regions and over time. [1] Water scarcity is driven by two factors (i) physical (physical or absolute water scarcity) or economic (economic water scarcity).

South Africa is considered a water-scarce country. [2] ; [3] ; [4] This is based principally on physical descriptors like climatic conditions and escalating water demands. This brief investigates whether observed water scarcity in South Africa can be attributed to physical or economic factors, or both.

Physical Water Scarcity

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization ( FAO ), [5] physical water scarcity occurs when there is not enough water to meet all demands, or inadequate natural water resources to supply a region's demand. According toFalkenmark [6] , there are four drivers of physical water scarcity: (i) demand-driven water scarcity, (ii) population-driven water scarcity, (iii) climate-driven water scarcity and (iv) pollution-driven water scarcity.

Demand-driven water scarcity occurs when water demand is higher than the capacity of available water sources. In cases where demand is population-driven, high population levels place pressure on the amount of water physically available, leading to per capita water shortages. This is termed population-driven water scarcity . According to UN Water, physical water scarcity is exacerbated by rapidly growing urban areas which place heavy pressure on adjacent water resources. [7]

According to the FAO (2007), areas more susceptible to severe physical water scarcity are those located where high population densities converge with low availability of freshwater. Typical examples in South Africa are the Gauteng and Western Cape provinces. Estimates suggest that Gauteng will receive a net immigration of 1.02 million people between 2016 and 2021. [8] According to Stats SA (2018), the Province remains the leading centre for both international (cross-border) migrants and domestic migrants (from rural areas of Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, and Eastern Cape).

The Western Cape is the second major immigration attraction centre in South Africa (Ibid). For example, between 1995 and 2018, Cape Town’s population grew by 79% — a growth not matched by sufficient increase in dam storage capacity (up by only about +15 percent over the same period). Population growth resulted in increased water demand at the residential level. [9]

Localised population growth coupled with profligate water use exert pressure on available resources, resulting in gross imbalances between water demand and supply. For instance, it is estimated that South Africans consume about 237 litres of water per person per day. This is well above the world average of 173 litres per day. [10]

Climate-driven water scarcity occurs when insufficient precipitation and high evaporation create low available stream run-off. This leads to limited water availability. Climate-driven water scarcity is exacerbated by global climate change, climate variability and recurrent droughts. South Africa, as has been noted is recognised as a water-scarce country. The country’s mean annual precipitation is 450 mm. This is well below the world average of 860 mm per year [11] . In terms of a commonly used definition, namely that of the average “Total Actual Renewable Water Resources” ( TARWR ) per person per year, South Africa is already ranked the 29 th driest country out of 193. [12] According to the Department of Communication and Information System, South Africa is the 30 th driest country in the world. [13]

In addition, South African precipitation concentration has been observed to exhibit variability in space and time (spatio-temporal variability). Spatial variability : South Africa experiences precipitation that varies significantly between its western and eastern regions. Annual precipitation in the north-western region often remains below 200 mm, whereas much of the eastern Highveld receives between 500 mm and 900 mm (occasionally exceeding 2000 mm) per annum (Botai et al ., 2016).

Temporal variability. According to Schulze (2007), the average amount of precipitation need not necessarily be a constraint for successful water resources operations. In fact, one can get by with, and adapt one’s practices and operating rules to, a low precipitation if one has the assurance that the rains will fall when needed or as expected. [14] While the amount of precipitation received may be an issue of concern, the temporal precipitation variability seems to be a critical dimension in South Africa’s water scarcity. In addition, droughts are recurrent and climate is unpredictable. On an annual timescale, South African precipitation concentration has been observed to be highly irregular in most parts of the country.

Pollution-driven water scarcity : water quality can degrade to the point that it is unusable. In this case the water may be available but remain unsuitable for beneficial uses resulting in water scarcity. Water scarcity is thus not merely a volumetric (quantity) issue but equally a quality issue. Consequently, the Rand Water [15] recognised that in South Africa the scarcity of freshwater is exacerbated by major increase in pollutant fluxes into river systems arising from river catchments. These are caused by urbanisation, deforestation, destruction of wetlands, industry, mining, agriculture, energy use, and accidental water pollution. These factors lead to the major reduction of available water resources.

Economic Water Scarcity

Economic water scarcity or social water scarcity (second-order water scarcity) is caused by a lack of investment in water or a lack of human capacity to satisfy the demand for water, even in places where water is abundant. It is induced by political power, policies, and/or socioeconomic relations. Symptoms include inadequate infrastructure development.

In 2006, the United Nations Development Programme ( UNDP ) human development report concluded that water scarcity is not solely rooted in the physical availability of water, but in unbalanced power relations, poverty, and inequality. [16] As a result, the FAO [17] emphatically posits water scarcity as an issue of poverty, where unclean water and lack of sanitation have been observed to be the destiny of poor people world-wide.

The observed water scarcity in South Africa is not exclusively attributable to physical drivers. It also has economic causes. Economic water scarcity is caused by a lack of investment in infrastructure or technology to draw water from rivers, aquifers or other water sources. In addition, insufficient human capacity to satisfy the demand for water may exacerbate scarcity (Schulte, 2014).

Geospatial aspects of economic water scarcity

South Africa’s history of apartheid geospatial planning has resulted in many rural areas not having access to basic water supply and sanitation services (Masindi & Duncker, 2016). [18] In eradicating the historical geospatial inequalities and socio-economic disparities numerous programs have been initiated since 1994.

Despite these programs, overt inequalities in water infrastructure delivery still exist between rural and urban areas. Predominately rural provinces and small towns are characterised by relatively high water-infrastructure backlog and low water service reliability. For instance, Stats South Africa (2016), observed that the municipalities with the largest percentage backlog are generally located in the largely rural areas along the Eastern seaboard in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, and to a lesser extent in Limpopo ( See infrastructure backlog map in the appendix ). The highest backlogs are observed in Ngquza Hill (81,7%), Port St Johns (81,3%) and Mbizana (77,8%). By contrast, municipalities such as Cape Town (0,2%), Drakenstein and Saldanha Bay (both 0,5%), and Witzenberg, and Sol Plaatjie (both 0,7%) barely registered any backlog.

In 2019, the investment disparities have not changed as predominantly rural provinces still lag behind.

This subjects rural households disproportionately to economic water scarcity. Similarly, the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, [19] points out there are gross inequalities in relation to access to safe water and sanitation. Individuals at a disadvantage are largely those in the rural areas, meaning, in demographic terms, poor, African residents of Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo.

It is apparent that observed water scarcity in South Africa is to a large extent attributable to physical causes. These are exacerbated by the impact of global climate change, climate variability and increasing demand on available water resources.

However, the root causes are not exclusively limited to physical conditions. The observed water scarcity in some parts of the country can be explained by uneven investment in water infrastructure, where geospatial disparities are obvious. Rural communities, small towns and rural provinces remain inadequately serviced. This subjects rural communities to the effects of both observed national physical water scarcity and localised economic water scarcity.

Nhlanhla Mnisi Researcher [email protected]

Appendix: Infrastructure backlog map

Water infrastructure backlog data sourced from: Water Services Knowledge System (URL: www.dwa.gov.za/wsks )

[1] Schulte, 2014. URL: https://pacinst.org/water-definitions/

[2] Muller et al . (2009), URL: https://www.dbsa.org/EN/About-Us/Publications/Documents/DPD%20No12.%20Water%20security%20in%20South%20Africa.pdf

[3] URL: https://www.environment.gov.za/sites/default/files/docs/water.pdf

[4] URL: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/world-water-day-water-crisis-explained/

[5] http://www.fao.org/resources/infographics/infographics-details/en/c/218939/

[6] Falkenmark (2007), URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42765865_On_the_Verge_of_a_New_Water_Scarcity_A_Call_for_Good_Governance_and_Human_Ingenuity

[7] https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity/

[8] Stas SA (2018), URL: http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=11331

[9] Environmental and energy study institute. URL: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/cape-towns-water-crisis-how-did-it-happen

[10] South African Minister of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation (2019), URL: http://www.dhs.gov.za/sites/default/files/speeches/budapest.pdf

[11] Botai et al . (2017).

[12] Muller et al . (2009), URL: https://www.dbsa.org/EN/About-Us/Publications/Documents/DPD%20No12.%20Water%20security%20in%20South%20Africa.pdf

[13] Department of Communication and Information System (2020), URL: https://www.gov.za/about-government/government-programmes/national-water-security-2015

[14] Schulze (2007), URL: http://sarva2.dirisa.org/resources/documents/beeh/Section%2006.3%20CV%20of%20Precip.pdf

[15] Rand Water (2017). URL: http://www.randwater.co.za/corporateresponsibility/wwe/pages/waterpollution.as px

[16] UNDP (2006), URL: https://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/corporate/HDR/2006%20Global%20HDR/HDR-2006-Beyond%20scarcity-Power-poverty-and-the-global-water-crisis.pdf

[17] FAO, URL: http://fao.org/3/a-aq444e.pdf

[18] Masindi & Duncker (2016), URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311451788_State_of_Water_and_Sanitation_in_South_Africa

[19] Parliamentary Monitoring Group (2017), URL: https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/23868/)

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South Africa has had lots of rain and most dams are full, but water crisis threat persists

Associate Professor and Research Specialist in Integrated Water Resource Management, University of South Africa

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Anja du Plessis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Most parts of South Africa, specifically its summer rainfall areas, have received above average rainfall since October 2021. This has led to an increase in the country’s national average water levels.

The total percentage of water stored in reservoirs nationally rose from 84.6% in mid-December 2021 to 88.7% at the end of the year . By mid March in 2022, the national average was 94% compared to 85% for the same period last year, with all provinces showing an overall increase .

The normal national water storage percentage for South Africa is typically between 85% and 80%. The drought from 2015 to 2018 depleted the country’s water storage levels, especially during the first half of 2016 when overall water storage fell below 50% .

South Africa is classified as being “water short” and moving towards “water stressed” in global terms. The country’s average annual rainfall is 450mm compared to the global average of 860mm . Highly variable rainfall has always led to skewed spatial distribution of water resources .

The skewed spatial distribution is clear when looking at runoff, which is water that drains from the surface of an area into river systems. Only 8% of the country’s land area generates 50% of the volume of water in its river systems – which in turn account for most of the country’s water.

The national storage capacity of major reservoirs in South Africa is currently 33,900 million cubic metres, created by 252 large dams . The country has long passed the stage where water requirements can be met from natural availability alone. Storage of water is essential for securing water supply. It’s also necessary because of the high variability in river flow within and between years.

Despite the recent rains, some areas have still not recovered from continued effects of the drought which has been ongoing since 2015. It’s been described as one of the worst droughts experienced by South Africa in recent times .

Read more: Why full dams don't mean water security: a look at South Africa

Communities, especially in the Eastern Cape province, are still facing water shortages or erratic water supply even though some major dams in other parts of the country are full. For example, the major water system of the Eastern Cape province, the Algoa Water Supply System, containing five dams supplying water to the Nelson Mandela Bay metropolitan area, hasn’t recovered. Its water levels are still at only 17.9% .

This shows that even though South Africa has received above average rainfall over most of its summer rainfall areas since October 2021, the country’s water resources are still under continued pressure. The primary drivers of this based on the findings of numerous reports and research , include unsustainably high water use and demand, persistent pollution from various sources, misappropriation of funds, collapsing or non-functional municipal sewage systems and a lack of skilled personnel.

The challenges

Climate scientists predict that increased climate variability will expose South Africa to more frequent and prolonged droughts . Population growth, rural-urban migration, industrialisation, and water pollution all place additional stress on scarce water resources.

Energy challenges also have a profound negative effect on water supply. Almost every step of the water cycle – producing, moving, treating and heating water, as well as collecting and treating wastewater – requires and consumes energy . South Africa’s energy challenges therefore also affect water provision, because power cuts interrupt water supply and negatively affect this water-energy nexus .

Poor water usage behaviour, especially by domestic water users, is a persistent issue. South Africans’ average domestic water use is an estimated 237 litres per capita per day. This is 64 litres higher than the international benchmark of 173 litres . This high use is partly attributed to high municipal non-revenue water. Approximately 41% of water that’s pumped or produced in South Africa is “lost” in a variety of ways before it reaches the water user or customer. This far exceeds the global best practice figure of 15% .

Non-revenue water includes physical losses due to leakage, which is often a result of poor operation and maintenance. It also includes commercial losses caused by meter manipulation or other forms of water theft as well as unbilled authorised consumption. These water losses vary across municipalities and service providers but an estimated average of 35% of physical losses occur in municipal systems .

Continued lack of proper investment in the maintenance of existing infrastructure has led to dilapidated water infrastructure. It’s the main reason for increasing levels of non-revenue water.

Water degradation

Water degradation is also a major issue in South Africa. It contributes to increased water scarcity by causing water resources to be of an unacceptable quality for various uses.

The main pollution challenges include large volumes of wastewater discharged from dysfunctional wastewater treatment works. These introduce excessive nutrients, phosphates and coliforms (bacteria or pathogens) into rivers .

The discharge of mining waste also introduces heavy metals into water sources and agricultural practices – which use pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers – introduce salts, chemicals and other toxic substances into receiving water sources through runoff .

Non-functional municipal sewage systems have created a sewage pollution crisis of varying degrees across the country. More than 90% of the total 824 treatment plants release raw or partially treated sewage into water resources. In 2015, it was estimated that 80% of South Africa’s freshwater resources were so badly polluted that no purification processes in the country could make it fit for consumption .

Sewage pollution isn’t a new issue. It has been ongoing and worsening due to the continuous decline of South Africa’s infrastructure, misappropriation of funds and a lack of skilled personnel to manage water bodies which now requires major intervention .

Going forward

Persistently high demand for water is driven by poor water usage behaviour, physical and commercial water losses and ecological degradation. All this together with water pollution adds to the country’s water constraints.

South Africa might have sufficient supply to meet current demand, but current government estimates show that demand will outstrip supply by 2025 . Current predictions show that the country will experience a water deficit of 17% by 2030 . Some research suggests that demand exceeded available yield as far back as 2017. This means the country is already experiencing water stress due to total water consumption already exceeding the amount of total water available. This implies that various water sectors are using more water than what’s available. This unsustainable water consumption is creating a water deficit.

Both the government and the population need to be more knowledgeable about the state of the country’s water availability and quality. The government must improve the overall management of water resources and address the deteriorating infrastructure, poor water and sanitation service delivery and water pollution.

The culture of unsustainable water use and poor management of water resources needs to change. Despite numerous dams overflowing, South Africa needs to take action to avoid a major water crisis in the near future.

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Day Zero: Where next?

Cape Town may have dodged the Day Zero bullet, but all across South Africa drought and rising demand is escalating a national water crisis.

As pellets of rain pounded the dry earth of Eastern Cape this January, a man launched himself into a puddle of water created by a broken drain. This spontaneous celebration seems symbolic of South Africa’s precarious but hopeful relationship with water: the country is desperately dry, making any precipitation extremely precious, but there are a few long-term solutions to help ease this ongoing water problem. In 2018, Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ became the focus for South Africa’s water crisis, but while its circumstances were certainly unique, the causes of its water problems were not—high demand and inadequate supply. As such, Cape Town’s situation is a warning for the whole country. South Africa relies on its rainwater, levels of which are unpredictable, unevenly distributed, and decreasing as a result of global warming. In October 2019, dams were at 10 to 60 percent below 2018’s levels. As of January 2020, some rain has fallen and some reservoirs are filling again, but the forecast is for more dry weather. And that means regions and cities across South Africa could soon be facing their own Day Zero—for some it has already arrived.

KwaZulu-Natal province is no stranger to drought. In 2019, rural communities south of Durban had to survive weeks without municipal water, depending instead upon unreliable tanker trucks. By November, protracted drought saw the province’s south coast suffering severe shortages as water sources dried up. There were calls for the town of Harding to be declared a disaster area, and urgent proposals for a bulk pipeline to secure its water supply- an expensive and complicated undertaking in a country where similar builds suffer from delays, cancellations, and poor workmanship. Meanwhile, Durban is losing around 35 percent of its municipal supply to theft and illegal connections, undermining the income needed to fund such vital improvements. Right now, the rains are falling, but unless supply improves and demand falls, towns across KwaZulu-Natal’s south coast district face their own looming Day Zero. It’s a familiar story across South Africa.

Gauteng province draws its water from the Integrated Vaal River System that includes a huge water transfer via the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. Last October, Johannesburg residents were hit with precautionary water restrictions when the Vaal Dam levels dropped to 53 percent, and planned maintenance stopped Lesotho’s water transfers for two months. To many, this highlighted the fragility of their water supply. Gauteng’s population is increasing rapidly, with domestic supply the fastest-growing sector, but its available water won’t increase until the Polihali Dam is completed in 2026. To avoid a water crisis, Gauteng must reduce water use in order to deal with population growth—cutting it by three percent per person per year. Last October’s heatwaves saw daily consumption rise by 264 million gallons (1,000 million liters), and compounded by infrastructure problems, suburban faucets ran dry in the capital. Without the certainty of six years of good rains, Johannesburg and Pretoria need to follow Cape Town’s lead and actively cut their water use.

In Eastern Cape, a crippling drought coupled with inadequate contingency plans left thousands without water last year. In the town of Adelaide, the dam dropped to just one percent of capacity and even then the authorities couldn’t act because they lacked funds. With no proper rain for at least five months, October saw councils in five municipalities declare drought disasters with calls for national disaster status. With many rivers and springs already dried up, even boreholes proved ineffective as groundwater became scarce because of the lack of rainfall to recharge it. Water recently released from a dam on the Kubusi River is providing some respite for towns like Butterworth, with supplies tankered out to surrounding communities, but the region is desperate for funds to be found for more substantial solutions to their ongoing water worries.

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Northern Cape’s reliance on rain-fed agriculture has seen years of serious drought devastate its agricultural sector. Abnormally hot weather and below average rainfall has scorched grazing lands and dried up watering holes, with wholesale livestock deaths and crop failures bringing financial ruin to farmers and a spike in food prices. It’s estimated that at least $40 million (R600 million) is needed to alleviate the drought’s effects and secure more than 60,000 jobs dependent on agriculture. The drought has also wiped out more than two-thirds of the province’s game, and there is the threat of total water supply failure for some towns; Kimberley cut its water supplies at night to reduce consumption. In January the rain began falling again but there is still a clear need for water saving measures and more efficient methods of agriculture, from installing drip irrigation systems to planting crops that can survive the even harsher droughts that future climate change could bring.

For Cape Town itself, Day Zero hasn’t disappeared, it’s merely been delayed. While the catastrophic shortage that nearly turned off its faucets was narrowly averted, Capetonians continue to survive on much less than they were used to—just over 27 gallons (105 liters) per person per day. These stringent restrictions, combined with new dam projects and desalination schemes, are keeping Cape Town sated if not exactly splashing through the summer—its dams are currently at around 70 percent capacity. However, in Free State province the town of QwaQwa needed 5,000 water tankers to provide immediate relief for its water shortage, while elsewhere in South Africa, the last couple of years have seen water restrictions in Limpopo province, faucets running dry in in Mpumalanga province, and the allocation of $20 million (R300 million) to upgrade failing water infrastructure in the North West province.

Across South Africa, water stress is a priority problem, but with no single cause there is no single solution. Each area experiences water issues caused to different degrees by excessive use, growing demand, pollution, theft, thirsty plants, inadequate infrastructure, and poor practices. Solving these issues not only requires financial investment but also a change in attitude. South Africa cannot support the water lifestyle some residents consider to be their right, fueling a water consumption that’s 35 percent above the global average. The Draft National Water and Sanitation Masterplan laid it out clearly: without a fundamental mind shift in the way South Africa thinks about water to accompany and underpin a massive $60 billion (R899 billion) investment, the country will run out of water by 2030. It’s a sobering message; while for many South Africans a little rain brings hope, hope alone will not guarantee South Africa’s water supply.

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South Africa’s Impending Water Crises: Transforming Water Crises into Opportunities and the Way Forward

• First Online: 14 January 2023

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This chapter focusses on providing a suitable discussion of water security from a global perspective, highlighting the various primary themes which play a role either by affecting water security or factors which need to be considered for water security to persist. The discussion of water security from a global perspective also emphasises the recognised importance of water and sanitation through continuous recognition and placing it at the top of the global agenda in an attempt to secure water resources for the future. This is followed by a synthesis of South Africa’s troubling freshwater reality. The main issues which have contributed to South Africa’s major freshwater challenges are discussed with the use of case studies and/or real-world examples to illustrate the country’s actual freshwater predicament. The different facets of South Africa’s water crisis and how these can be addressed to transform the predicament into opportunities with informed decisions and proactive management is also discussed. Matters which require urgent attention are highlighted and interventions and/or solutions are given based on the primary cause of a specific water crisis and/or problem. The pertinent issues which require urgent informed actions are emphasised and possible measures or solutions is suggested to provide a way forward.

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du Plessis, A. (2023). South Africa’s Impending Water Crises: Transforming Water Crises into Opportunities and the Way Forward. In: South Africa’s Water Predicament. Water Science and Technology Library, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24019-5_7

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How can South Africa overcome its water challenges and avoid the African water crisis?

About 2.2 billion people across the globe don't have access to clean drinking water – an alarming number as water is a basic need for your health and basic hygiene . This has shown the growing need for water. But, apart from people not having access to potable water, water scarcity is also something that has become a cause of concern. 

Climate change is the leading cause of water scarcity, and the growing population is putting even more strain on the available water resources around the world. However, when we look at Africa, we realise that there is a major threat. Not only do we face water challenges due to climate change, but we face challenges in accessing water resources. 

According to ESI Africa , "South Africa is approaching physical water scarcity in 2025 where they are expected to experience a water deficit of 17 percent by 2030, and climate change will worsen the situation." This article will look into the water challenges South Africa faces and whether we can avoid Africa’s water crisis. 

Lack of water usage knowledge

One of South Africa’s most prominent water issues is that most people don’t have enough knowledge on how to preserve it. According to research done by the Institute for security studies , South Africans use more water than the global average. South Africans currently use 234 litres of water per person daily, and the country’s per capita water consumption is higher than the global average of 173 litres. South Africans need to learn how to conserve water if they wish to avoid water scarcity. This can be done through tiered pricing, where users are charged when they consume a higher rate than what is considered necessary for daily activities. Other ways include having incentives for consumers to consider purchasing water-efficient appliances and go above and beyond to find ways to use less water. 

Wastewater treatment is insufficient

Accordin g to Daily Maverick, billions of litres of poorly treated or untreated sewage , industri al and pharmaceutical wastewater are disposed of into rivers and oceans. A total of 56 percent of the country's treatment plants are in poor or critical condition. Groundwater is also underused, especially in the agriculture sector. We need to work on improving the wastewater treatment as it can ensure there isn’t any unsafe drinking water in Africa and more available water for citizens while ensuring that South Africa doesn’t experience the same water crisis in African countries. 

Frequent droughts

Since 2015, South Africa has experienced water shortages . This is mainly because of climate change, which causes rainfall delays that eventually decrease dam levels, leading to droughts within the country. It is important that we work towards protecting the environment to ensure that we slow down the implications of climate change. 

DBSA’s role 

The DBSA is aware of the water scarcity in the country and the projections of water deficit in the future. As mentioned above, water scarcity is caused by a number of factors within the country. This is why we strive to ensure economic infrastructure to promote adequate water sources while continuing to inform and educate citizens so that every South African household has access to suf fi c ient clean, safe water and sanitation. 

At th e DBSA, we off er a range of financial and non-financial solutions for water and sanitation challenges within South Africa. With investments from the private sector along with DFI, government and concessional funding, we will be able to address the water challenges and hopefully prolong our water sources to avoid exacerbating the water crisis. 

Final thoughts

Water and sanitation in Africa is an ongoing crisis that needs to be addressed. Not only do we need to improve sanitation, but we need to ensure that households gain access to water supplies that offer safe drinking water, fix our wastewater treatments, and educate people on the importance of water conservation and how they can reduce the impact of climate change. Investing in water and sa n itation ensures the betterment of a ll citizens. While there is a cause for concern regarding water in the future, if stakeholders work together, we can find viable solutions to water scarcity in Africa and South Africa.

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INTRODUCTION

Related research, contribution, water usage: a long-term analysis, results and discussion, acknowledgements, data availability statement, water scarcity and poverty: the lasting impact of a maintenance campaign at south african schools across the affluence divide.

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M. J. Booysen , S. Gerber; Water scarcity and poverty: The lasting impact of a maintenance campaign at South African schools across the affluence divide. Water Sci Technol 15 November 2021; 84 (10-11): 3246–3256. doi: https://doi.org/10.2166/wst.2021.424

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Water features prominently in discussions on sustainability. The recent Cape Town ‘Day Zero’ drought heightened fears about global cities running dry as the climate changes. During that crisis a campaign was launched to save water at schools, consisting of a basic maintenance campaign and a behavioural campaign. The former was limited to easy fixes, and the latter comprised an information campaign and an information and competition campaign. The impacts of these were assessed immediately after the interventions. This paper revisits the maintenance results by assessing the difference in responses according to affluence levels of the schools, and by evaluating the impacts one year after the campaigns. We find that the poorer schools were not able to sustain the maintenance gains, especially at the primary schools.

Assessed impact of a maintenance campaign at Cape Town schools during ‘Day Zero’ drought.

Short- and long-term impact – a year later – are evaluated.

School affluence is evaluated as a factor in the effectiveness of the maintenance campaign.

Short-term impact was greater at poor schools, but gains diminished a year later.

Affluent schools benefitted from a lower base in the short term, and maintained gains better.

By 2025 half of the world's population will be living in water-stressed areas ( WHO 2019 ). As climate change becomes more prevalent due to increasing global temperatures, rainfall is expected to become progressively more extreme, leading to a rise in both droughts and floods globally. This attributed to the El Niño weather pattern seen in South Africa in 2015, and which culminated in the worst prolonged drought the country has experienced since at least the 1940s ( Baudoin et al. 2017 ). Average dam levels decreased from 93% in early 2014 to a low of 48% in November 2016. But water supply in South Africa is unevenly distributed due to changes in climate, invasive plant species and rapid urbanisation in the country's cities ( Enqvist & Ziervogel 2019 ).

Cape Town was the worst affected major city, with water levels of freshwater supplying dams nearing 15%. In early 2018, the city was declared a disaster area with a countdown towards a ‘Day Zero’. Authorities and citizens feared a complete shutdown of all water resources. This would have required manual collection of daily water rations ( Enqvist & Ziervogel 2019 ). This event brought water security and management into sharp focus in South Africa, leading many to question whether the drought was the main cause of water scarcity in the city and the rest of the country. The drought was simply a catalyst highlighting many underlying vulnerabilities in South Africa's water system and the challenges it faces to ensure water security for its entire population ( Donnenfeld et al. 2018 ).

Water is indispensable for life: the need to maintain its availability is vital. Thus, there has been a recent surge in new studies and developments aimed at improving water management and security ( Bougadis et al. 2005 ; Ghiassi et al. 2008 ; Adamowski et al. 2012 ; Ren & Li 2016 ).

However, limited research has been done in the non-residential and educational sectors even though these sectors can be large users of freshwater resources ( Booysen et al. 2019b ). In particular, schools were a primary concern during Cape Town's Day Zero campaign – not only because they would have to close once the water ran out and thereby affect education, but also due to their excessive usage volumes ( Gallego Sanchez-Torija et al. 2017 ).

According to the South African School's Act of 1996, immovable funds should always be available in case of emergency and routine repairs. However, due to mismanagement of government funds many schools are left with extremely constrained budgets ( Spaull 2019 ; Samuels et al. 2020 ; WCG 2020 ). These financial constraints make it exceedingly difficult for schools to maintain their water delivery infrastructure. As a result, they generally lose large amounts of water each month ( Booysen et al. 2019a ). Moreover, schools are generally billed on a month to month basis using the recorded usages on their municipal water meter. Not only do these bills take months to arrive, but they are often paid by the central education department, worsening an already unfavourable situation.

This section analyses recently published studies working to combat poor water management in schools. As the need for more stringent water management and usage guidelines grows within water-scarce countries, conservation efforts within schools have evolved as well. A recent study by Bueno (2019) implemented various sustainability measures within schools in the Philippines to reduce energy and water usage. The study found that there was a large increase in wastage in older schools built before the introduction of sustainability measures. Favourable savings were achieved through both technological and behavioural interventions. The study concluded that the ability to minimise water use, waste and loss over longer periods is heavily dependent on constant reinforcement measures. These include technical and educational assistance programmes to educate teachers and students adequately.

Tang et al. (2006) examined the conditions of water management and infrastructure within schools in Windhoek, Namibia to reduce usage. The study revealed that the most cost-effective method for reducing water usage within schools was educating maintenance workers to perform regular infrastructure assessments. It was found that investments in tap, toilet and shower-head repairs repaid themselves within 9, 85 and 33 days, respectively. Additional measures include educating the first and eighth-grade students in compulsory sustainability courses, holding regular awareness campaigns, and incentivising schools to reduce their water usage by refunding them a percentage of their monthly savings to be better spent on improving the quality of education delivered within the school.

Middlestadt et al. (2010) led a behavioural intervention study in Jordan focused on educating students to make more environmentally responsible decisions. A group of experimental and control students were compared, with the experimental group performing better in all evaluations. The study concluded that short-term behavioural changes precede attitudinal changes. Nevertheless, some students may require evidence of progress using performance metrics to sustain their environmentally-friendly behaviour.

Xiong et al. (2016) investigated the effectiveness of a compulsory water conservation education programmes for all Grade 9 students in China's major cities. A survey from Guangzhou determined that although 95% of students enroled in the course were aware of the need for water conservation, only 19% were willing to actively use water more responsibly. It was also determined that student behaviour improves significantly with age: 14, 24 and 56% of intervened students reduced their total water usage from primary schools, high schools and universities, respectively.

These studies have highlighted many of the challenges schools face, not only in terms of maintenance and financial difficulties but also the need to actively enforce behavioural interventions when working with students.

Within the South African context, there are many similar and more pressing issues. Most notably the recent drought in Cape Town. The South African education system is ill-equipped and lacks the necessary financial resources needed to effectively manage such events ( Xaba 2012 ; Spaull 2019 ; WCG 2020 ). The School's Act of 1995 was created to combat the wealth gap within schools and to ensure effective management of financial resources and much-needed maintenance to infrastructure. But, these policies were never properly initiated, leading to mismanagement of public funds and a greater educational gap between the richer and poorer schools in the country ( Lomofsky & Lazarus 2001 ; Engelbrecht & Harding 2008 ; Booysen et al. 2019b ). A study by van der Berg et al. (2011) reported on how the low quality of education provided in schools within disadvantaged communities can lead to exclusion and marginalisation, limiting the prospects of learners from a young age. In 2006 49% of education spending reached the poorest 40% of households ( van der Berg 2009 ; van der Berg et al. 2011 ). In 2017 this had improved to 54% ( McLaren 2017 ). However, after personnel spending and conditional grants, only 10% to 20% of the budget remained for non-personnel expenses, which includes textbooks, laboratory equipment, stationery, school maintenance and utility costs.

In 2008 a call was made to amend the National Education Policy and to prioritise maintenance spending for schools with many reporting that the allocated amount of R209 million was insufficient for all schools in the Western Cape. According to a 2019/2020 report, this allocation had increased to R636 million for maintenance alone ( WCG 2019 ). However, 2019 reports have also stated that R300 million of the allocated maintenance budget had to be diverted for drought mitigation measures ( WCED 2019 ). The report also acknowledges that there is a large backlog of maintenance still needed to be done and that many of the staff employed by schools are not sufficiently skilled to perform the maintenance effectively.

Water supply within South African schools is unreliable. In 2015 the Department of Basic Education released a report indicating that 3% of schools had no access to water, and more than 25% of schools had an unreliable water supply with more than 4,500 schools relying on pit latrines ( WCED 2019 ). Financial constraints coupled with governmental warnings of school closures during the water crisis due to insufficiently trained staff to fix leaks should they occur makes it clear: the disconnect between the educational and political spheres in the country is immense.

The discussed studies ( Tang et al. 2006 ; Middlestadt et al. 2010 ; Xiong et al. 2016 ; Bueno 2019 ) investigated the effects of technical and behavioural interventions within schools in developing nations with water-scarce areas. These studies presented favourable findings and provided recommendations on how to improve sustainability measures in the long term. But cognisance has to be taken of the South African context. South Africa's education system is spread over all socio-economic groups: each requires to a varying degree government intervention through funding and maintenance schemes. The ability to quantify the effects of behavioural and technical interventions for schools from different socio-economic groups will empower decision makers to make better data-driven decisions. This will allow them to allocate funds more effectively as well as to improve the responsiveness of their maintenance programmes.

Since the 2008 amendments to the National Education Policy several studies have evaluated water-saving interventions, and water awareness campaigns at small samples of schools ( Still & Bhagwan 2008 ). Further studies by Nhlapo (2009) and Xaba (2012) investigated the maintenance needs of schools in Gauteng, concluding that current maintenance plans were reactive rather than proactive. Moreover, due to a lack of funds maintenance was performed by gardeners and groundsmen rather than qualified technicians. This serves to highlight the need to establish an effective school maintenance policy.

Recent studies performed the most comprehensive analysis of water usage and management within schools in the Western Cape ( Visser et al. 2021 ; Booysen et al. 2019a , 2019b ). This included investigating socio-economic effects, behavioural interventions and technical interventions. These studies provided favourable results and recommendations, equipping local policymakers with the knowledge to implement better water management policies. However, none of these or the other discussed studies evaluated the long-term viability of their interventions, and none evaluated the impact of school affluence on the interventions.

There has been a recent surge in the deployment of smart water meters in South Africa, albeit from a very low base. Accurate water usage data is essential for specifying a building's water demand. In South Africa, most buildings receive their water usage monthly from their municipal water meter. This oversimplified metric is unable either to characterise a building's demand or to determine quickly if a leak has occurred.

The most comprehensive study by Booysen et al. (2019a) explored usage data from 156 schools over 30 days in 2017. The behavioural study performed by Visser et al. (2021) evaluated 105 schools over a period from February 2018 to October 2018.

This paper describes the medium- and long-term effects of a campaign that was run at schools during 2017 and 2018 in the run-up to Day Zero in Cape Town. The campaign had a behavioural and maintenance component ( Booysen et al. 2019b ; Visser et al. 2021 ). The objective of this study is to evaluate the long-term effects of technological intervention within schools in the Western Cape and to better define the effects of poverty on a school's water usage. In addition to providing an understanding of the long-term impacts of these interventions at schools – something not known at present – these results will assist with the decision-making process necessary to amend and improve current water management and conservation policies. This study will explore usage data of 270 schools from October 2017 until August 2019.

Data exploration

Using the available dataset of 270 schools and taking into account the observations made during previous studies, several features were identified to better describe the data for analysis based on the following factors: (1) it was observed that some schools are used as church buildings on Sundays; (2) more affluent schools have sporting activities on Saturdays and during weekday evenings; (3) some schools have learners and staff who stay in hostels and residences on the school property; (4) some poorer schools have adult education and community programmes during the evenings and (5) some more affluent schools water their sports fields after 23:00 to avoid water evaporating unnecessarily.

As with the previous studies it is especially important to be able to distinguish water wastage from general usage when looking at school usage profiles. For example, some schools might consider a large nightly water usage as leakage, but to more affluent schools it may just be the periodic wetting of sports grounds.

Overview of schools in dataset

The large smart meter dataset evaluated during this study encompasses all types of schools present in the Western Cape and the rest of South Africa. The National Norms and Standards for School Funding established how much government funding each non-private school would receive based on their quintile level. A quintile level between 1 and 5 is assigned to each school in the country with the poorest 20% of students attending quintile 1 schools and the most affluent 20% of students attending quintile 5 schools. These categories were established on a national level. Thus, certain provinces will have more wealthy students, and as such, more quintile 5 schools than other provinces. The Western Cape is one of the most prosperous provinces and has the largest relative percentage of quintile 5 schools.

In addition to the quintile classification, schools are grouped into fee-paying or non-fee paying schools, as well as Section 20 and Section 21 schools. Fee-paying schools charge their students fees to raise their necessary funding. Non-fee paying schools do not charge learners school fees. Moreover, Section 21 schools are responsible for paying for their own upgrades, school materials, utility bills and maintenance ( Samuels et al. 2020 ). These schools are allocated funding by the government; however, from observations made during previous studies, this funding was found to be insufficient ( Booysen et al. 2019a ). In contrast, Section 20 schools are not charged monthly utility costs and are not responsible for their own maintenance. The service for these schools is provided directly by the government. Most non-fee and Section 20 schools fall within quintiles 1 to 3, receiving a combined 80% of the government's educational expenditure distributed to the poorest 60% of learners ( McLaren 2017 ).

This study expands on the socio-economic view of the various groups of schools defined above by introducing a poverty index scaler. The value, ranging from 0 to 1, is defined on a provincial basis rather than the quintile index's national basis. The number is calculated from two equally weighted factors: (1) the physical condition, facilities and crowding of the school, and (2) the relative poverty of the community surrounding the school compared to the rest of the province. An overview of the evaluated schools is presented in Figure 1 , indicating that the quintile classification by itself may be insufficient to describe the socio-economic state of a school.

Distribution of schools from different quintiles in relation to the Western Cape poverty index.

Table 1 provides a breakdown of the schools in the dataset. Most schools were classified as quintile 4 and 5 (73.3%). Most schools were self-governed (75.7%) and required students to pay fees (54.8%).

Breakdown of schools in the complete dataset

Overview of interventions performed at schools in the dataset

Booysen et al. (2019b) describes the maintenance project, which was launched during the Day Zero water-savings campaign. A maintenance drive was performed, and reliable records are available for 196 schools. The drive was carried out in two steps: basic maintenance (M1) and an in-depth follow-up (M2). Basic maintenance consisted of a certified plumber following a guided checklist and a budget restriction to complete the maintenance (ZAR 5000 at the time of maintenance in December 2017). The guided checklist included ensuring that no leaks occurred in the kitchen, bathrooms and staff rooms, as well as making sure that all water heaters (boilers or geysers), outside taps and the main stop valve were in working order. An in-depth follow-up was carried out at the school to assess the work done during M1. The authors used a simple baseline comparison and reported 28% reduction in mean minimum nightly flow (MNF) within 5 days after the M1 maintenance campaign.

Analysis technique and metrics

The objective of this study is to determine the long-term effects of a maintenance campaign on the water usage of a school, and to establish the impact of affluence (the poverty index, the quintile and the fee-payment) on this response.

The MNF is the average hourly water usage between 01:00 and 04:00. It is used as an indicator for possible leaks and wastage. This metric has been used in previous studies ( Candelieri et al. 2013 ; Loureiro et al. 2016 ).

In addition to MNF, the mean daily flow (MDF) metric was used, which describes the average hourly water usage per calendar day. This metric was used to avoid large leaks being mistaken for behavioural changes: a large spike in MNF and MDF would indicate a leak.

To determine the lasting effects of the intervention, a deviation metric in the MNF and MDF was used to identify outliers and possible leaks calculated by means of Chauvenet's criterion. The statistical theory establishes a probability band from a set of data points that should reasonably contain all the samples of the dataset.

For the maintenance intervention, a large deviation in MNF would indicate a probable burst. The mean value μ m is calculated from the previous 3 weeks' MNF usages, excluding weekends and school holidays. The period of 3 weeks was considered to be long enough to accommodate for single-day usage surges and short enough not to reduce the seasonal effects on usage. A large deviation from the MDF immediately after the intervention would indicate that the usage of the school has returned to its pre-intervention levels.

The probability of the observation being Z standard deviations from the mean is then found using the normal distribution function, denoted P z . If the probability of a particular observation's deviation from the mean is less than ½ n with n being the total number of observations, the particular observation is flagged as an anomaly. If two successive observations are flagged as anomalies, it is assumed that the usage trend has deviated from the norm, and that a burst has occurred or that the school's MDF has returned to its pre-intervention levels.

Table 2 identifies the data and features used during the data analysis process.

Data analysis parameters used during the evaluation

Water usage trends within schools

Figure 2(a) and 2(b) presents the MDF per person at primary schools and high schools, respectively. All quintiles are highlighted, and schools are plotted based on their poverty index. Schools with lower poverty indices are more affluent, and those with higher poverty indices are more impoverished.

MDF per person in litre per hour (00:00–23:59). (a) Primary schools. (b) High schools.

A trend line is presented in Figure 2 , showing the line of best fit for the scattered schools. From Figure 2(b) it clear that more affluent high schools use larger amounts of water per person. This is due to several factors including more bathrooms at the school, regular watering of the sports grounds and a higher likelihood of having a hostel ( Booysen et al. 2019a ). The usage then decreases as the poverty index increases before sharply rising again once the poverty index passes 0.6 for primary schools and 0.7 for high schools. The sharp upward trend distinguishes the boundary of fee paying, and non-fee paying schools. Non-fee paying schools have much smaller maintenance and repair budgets, leading to more frequent leaks and bursts ( Booysen et al. 2019a ). Moreover, these schools do not pay their own bills, at best breaking the information loop; at worst disabling a good maintenance regime ( Samuels et al. 2020 ). A similar but less pronounced pattern is visible in Figure 2(a) , which depicts the primary schools.

Figure 3 presents the MNF per person. The shape of the trend line is the same as that of the MDF per person in Figure 2 . From these figures it can be deduced that more affluent primary schools use less water than the more affluent high schools. This can be attributed to high schools often housing students on the schools' premises, as well as having a larger number of sports grounds to water during the evenings. Importantly, the MNF, which is a proxy for leaks, is substantially higher at the poorer schools. The figures also show that the water usage per person remains similar for both high schools and primary schools.

MNF per person in litre per hour (01:00–04:00). (a) Primary schools. (b) High schools.

Maintenance intervention

Figure 4 presents the results from the maintenance project for primary and high schools. The MNF is shown and used as a measure of detecting abnormal flow, giving an indication of possible leaks if a large amount of water is used during these hours. The figures present the averaged MNF calculated for the 3 weeks preceding and immediately after the maintenance, and three weeks precisely 1 year after the maintenance.

MNF before, immediately after and 1 year after maintenance campaign. (a) Primary schools. (b) High schools.

From both figures it can be seen that the maintenance reduced the median MNF for all quintiles at both school types. The averaged improvement in MNF for the 3 weeks immediately after the maintenance was a 29% reduction in flow.

The median reductions as percentages and flow rates are given in Table 3 and discussed next.

Reductions as a result of maintenance on MNF at the different schools immediately after and 1 year after the intervention

The medians are compared as differences in percentage and L/h.

a The results reported by Booysen et al. (2019b) were based on a mean reduction, and used only a week before and a week after maintenance. This paper used 3 weeks prior, 3 weeks subsequent to maintenance, and 3 weeks a year later. The results are therefore not directly comparable and only given as a reference.

For the Q2 and Q3 schools, the median MNF reduced immediately after maintenance by 13% (from 198 L/h) for the primary schools and by 53% for the high schools (from 318 L/h). The improvement was substantially more at the high schools, which tend to have bigger a infrastructure to maintain. The difference between the mean and median changes at primary schools seen in the distribution indicates that the reduction was more pronounced at the few heavy users in the top half of the distribution. The high schools' reduction was more equally shared. A year later, at the Q2 and Q3 primary schools, the MNF increased from the baseline at the median school by 26%, indicating an evenly spread net deterioration of the infrastructure over time. That this deterioration was not prevented could potentially be explained by the subsidence of the Day Zero threat, but the same effect is substantially less pronounced at more affluent primary schools, described next. It is therefore more likely to be due to lack of ongoing maintenance and gradual deterioration. At the high schools, the maintenance had a longer lasting impact, resulting in a lasting improvement at the median school of 30% a year after maintenance.

At the Q4 primary schools, the median school's immediate MNF reduction was 21% (from 105 L/h) and the mean for all schools was 12% (from 105 L/h). This difference indicates that savings at some ‘lossy’ schools were offset by deterioration at others, evidenced by the increase in the maximum whisker (+11%) despite the reduction in the 75th percentile (−20%). At the Q4 high schools, the picture was similar, with immediate reductions in MNF of 29% (from 105 L/h) at the median school, and a mean reduction of 26% (from 109 L/h) across high schools. Interestingly, the Q4 high schools were more prudent than the primary schools in absolute terms, despite having a larger infrastructure. After a year, the median primary school had worsened to an increase in MNF of 23% from the baseline, similar to the Q2 and Q3 primary schools At the high schools, the median high school had maintained a 30% reduction in MNF a year later, again mimicking the Q2 and Q3 secondary schools.

The Q5 schools managed better to maintain their infrastructure over time, probably due to the availability of disposable funds. After the initial maintenance drive, the MNF at the median primary school was 46% (from 52 L/h), but the mean reduction across schools was only 3% (from 76 L/h). This indicates that maintenance at the affluent schools, on average, was already in a better state than at the poor schools. At these low levels of MNF, a newly sprung leak at one or two schools can diminish the collective benefit. At the Q5 high schools, the median school reduced their MNF by 49% (from 126 L/h). However, since the baseline is low, the 49% saved at the median school is small in comparison with the large volumes saved at the poorer schools. After a year, the median primary school managed to improve their MNF even further, with a reduction of 52% from the baseline. A year later, the affluent high schools managed to maintain a 7% reduction on average, with the median school maintaining 37% reduction from the baseline.

Interestingly, when the median primary schools for each of the quintile groupings are considered, the flow rate reductions after immediate maintenance were very similar, but from very different baselines: 25 L/h, 22 L/h and 24 L/h for Q2 and Q3, Q4 and Q5 schools, respectively. After the year, the change in absolute MNF was in the opposite direction. A year later, the median Q2 and Q3 school had increased their MNF by 52 L/h compared to the original baseline. This is a stark difference when compared to the other quintiles a year on: the median Q4 school lost 24 L/h more than the baseline, with the mean fairly stable at 5 L/h more. At the Q5 schools, the median school actually improved further, as we saw earlier.

These results seem to indicate that money is best spent at the Q2 and Q3 schools, but that the impact is lasting at the high schools, while the primary schools need continuing maintenance to secure the gains.

In order to further assess the long-term effectiveness of the maintenance, the technique described earlier was used. If no improvement in MNF was recorded immediately following the maintenance, it was assumed that no leaks were present. If a school's MNF was flagged as an anomaly for successive days, it was assumed that a burst or leak had occurred. If a leak was present within 3 months from the date of maintenance, the intervention was classified as a short-term improvement. If an event was not detected within 3 months the intervention was classified as a long-term improvement. Table 4 presents the improvement timelines for the maintenance performed at the schools. The results show that in all cases an improvement was registered; at least half of the schools had a long-term improvement. A third or more of the schools had a long-term improvement, with 47% of Q2 and Q3 primary schools still showing improvements after a year, and 55% of Q4 secondary schools still showing improvements after a year.

Longevity of the maintenance performed at schools

Percentage of schools in each category.

Water sustains life, and nowhere is our dependence on it clearer than in large cities in drought-stricken areas. In this paper we assessed the impact of a maintenance campaign that was performed during Cape Town's Day Zero drought. In addition to the existing research on the topic, we evaluated the impact of affluence on the response to the campaigns, and also gauged the long-term impact of the campaigns.

The results showed a strong correlation between the poverty index of the school and the amount of water used. Affluent schools used more than the median schools, but the poorer schools used the most, showing some resemblance to a U-curve. This trend was visible for the whole day as well as for midnight hours. The affluent schools probably use more due to larger and more facilities, and price insensitivity; the median schools use less because of price sensitivity with sufficient finances to maintain the plumbing; while the poorer schools probably use most because of an information asymmetry and lack of funds to keep up maintenance.

The maintenance results showed that maintenance had the biggest immediate impact on the poorer schools, with both the median and mean school's usage dropping substantially. However, the gains were not long-lasting for most poor schools, with only 47% of poor primary schools and 44% of poor high schools still benefiting a year later.

An important factor to take into consideration, however, is that the urge to improve maintenance is constricted by the availability of financial resources.

The Q4 schools are in the precarious position that they receive fewer grants from government than the poorer Q2 and Q3 schools, but they also have less financial resources than the more affluent Q5 schools, despite having to maintain substantial infrastructure. After the initial behavioural campaign, all the schools in the project were given access to the online smart metering platform, and were sent weekly reports. Moreover, the Cape Town Council had increased their tariffs and these would have finally found their way onto the bills.

The authors would like to extend their sincere gratitude to the many corporate, academic and governmental parties that made this project, www.schoolswater.co.za , and the research possible. We would like to extend a special word of gratitude to Shoprite, Cape Talk, the Western Cape Education Department, the Office of the Premier, the Water Research Commission, Bridgiot, InnovUS, MTN, Stellenbosch University and our collaborators at the University of Cape Town.

Data cannot be made publicly available; readers should contact the corresponding author for details.

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Water Scarcity in Africa: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

The problem of water scarcity has cast a shadow over the wellbeing of humans. According to estimates, in 2016, nearly 4 billion people – equivalent to two-thirds of the global population – experience severe water scarcity for a prolonged period of time. If the situation doesn’t improve, 700 million people worldwide could be displaced by intense water scarcity by 2030. Africa, in particular, is facing severe water scarcity and the situation is worsening day by day. Resolute and substantial action is needed to address the issue.

Water Scarcity in Africa: An Overview

Water scarcity is the condition where the demand for water exceeds supply and where available water resources are approaching or have exceeded sustainable limits. 

The problem of water scarcity in Africa is not only a pressing one but it is also getting worse day by day. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) , water scarcity affects 1 in 3 people in the African Region and the situation is deteriorating because of factors such as population growth and urbanisation but also climate change.

Water scarcity can be classified into two types: physical and economic. Physical water scarcity occurs when water resources are overexploited for different uses and no longer meet the needs of the population. In this case, there is not enough water available in physical terms. Economic water scarcity, on the other hand, is linked to poor governance, poor infrastructure, and limited investments. The latter type of water scarcity can exist even in countries or areas where water resources and infrastructure are adequate. 

As reported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in 2011, arid regions of the continent – mainly located in North Africa – experience frequent physical water scarcity, while Sub-Saharan Africa undergoes mainly economic water scarcity. Indeed, the latter region has a decent levels of physical water , mainly thanks to the abundant, though highly seasonal and unevenly distributed supply of rainwater. This region’s access to water, however, is constrained due to poor infrastructure, resulting in mainly economic rather than physical water scarcity.

Figure 1: Map of physical and economic water scarcity at basin level in 2007 across the African continent.

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In a 2022 study conducted on behalf of the United Nations University Institute for Water Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), researchers employed indicators to quantify water security in all of Africa’s countries. They found that only 13 out of 54 countries reached a modest level of water security in recent years, with Egypt, Botswana, Gabon, Mauritius and Tunisia representing the better-off countries in Africa in terms of water security. 

19 countries – which are home to half a billion people – are deemed to have levels of water security below the threshold of 45 on a scale of 1 to 100. On the other hand, Somalia, Chad, and Niger are the continent’s least water-secure countries.

Egypt performs the best regarding access to drinking water while the Central African Republic performs the worst. The latter, however, has the highest per capita water availability while half of North African countries are characterised by absolute water scarcity. This again shows that Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Africa face economic water scarcity more than physical water scarcity. 

Causes of Water Scarcity in Africa

Human activities, which result in overexploitation and global warming, are the main culprit for the water scarcity in Africa. Overexploitation is the main contributor to physical water scarcity. A 2018 report published by the Institute for Security Studies stated that more than 60% of South Africa’s rivers are being overexploited and only one-third of the country’s main rivers are in good condition. Lake Chad – once deemed Africa’s largest freshwater body and important freshwater reservoir – is shrinking because of overexploitation of its water. According to a 2019 report , for this reason alone, the water body of the lake has diminished by 90% since the 1960s, with the surface area of the lake decreasing from 26,000 square kilometres in 1963 to less than 1,500 square kilometres in 2018. 

Figure 2: The size of Lake Chad shows a massive shrinking between 1972 and 2007.

The underlying cause for overexploitation can be further broken down to the increase in water demand, driven by the rise in population growth and rate of urbanisation. 

Population in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing at a rate of 2.7% a year in 2020, more than twice that of South Asia (1.2%) and Latin America (0.9%). Meanwhile, the population of Nigeria – a country in West Africa – is forecasted to double by 2050. As for the rate of urbanisation, according to the United Nations , 21 out of the 30 fastest-growing cities in the world in 2018 are deemed to be in Africa. Cities such as Bamako in Mali and Yaounde in Cameroon have experience explosive growth. 

The booming population will inevitably lead to more food demand, a faster rate of urbanisation and an rise in industrial activities, all of which require abundant water supply.

Climate change and global warming – mainly caused by an increase in human and commercial activities – equally contribute to water scarcity in Africa. As a report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa found, a 1C rise in global temperatures would result in a reduction of runoff   – excess rainwater that flows across the land’s surface – by up to 10%. Another study stated that the declining trends of rainfall caused by global warming will continue in North Africa, limiting groundwater recharge and exacerbating groundwater depletion. Although in areas closer to the equator, a soar in precipitation will likely occur as a result of global warming, the increased potential evapotranspiration   – the combined loss of water through the plant’s process of transpiration and evaporation of water from the earth’s surface – and drought risks in the majority of the continent still outweigh the increased rainfall in these areas. 

Consequences of Water Scarcity in Africa

Water scarcity is expected to affect the economic condition, the health of citizens as well as ecosystems in Africa. 

In economic terms, the agriculture sector is likely to be hampered under severe water scarcity. Agriculture is one of the most pivotal economic sectors for Africa, employing the majority of the population. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, it accounts for nearly 14% of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As the sector that relies on water the most, agriculture is already heavily impacted by water scarcity and the situation is expected to further deteriorate, leading to other issues such as food shortages and, in the worst cases, famine.

You might also like: Why We Should Care About Food Security

Not surprisingly, water shortage is an immense threat to human’s health. In times of water scarcity, people are often forced to get their water supply from contaminated ponds and streams. When ingested, polluted water results in widespread diarrhoeal diseases including cholera, typhoid fever, salmonellosis, other gastrointestinal viruses, and dysentery. Quality of healthcare services in many African countries is low, with only 48% African people having access to healthcare. The poor system has made diarrhoeal diseases life-threatening and in many cases even fatal. 

A study published in 2021 found that severe diarrheal disease accounts for about 600,000 deaths each year in sub-Saharan Africa, with the majority being children and elderly. Diarrheal disease is the third-leading cause of disease and death among African children under the age of five, a situation that public health authorities blame on poor quality of water and sanitation. 

Lastly, water shortages jeopardise ecosystems and contribute to a loss in biodiversity. Africa is home to some of the most unique freshwater ecosystems in the world. Lake Turkana is the world’s largest desert lake, while Lake Malawi hosts the richest freshwater fish fauna in the world, home to a staggering 14% of the world’s freshwater fish species. If not tackled, water scarcity will disrupt and likely terminate freshwater and marine ecosystems in the continent. 

You might also like: 10 of the Most Endangered Species in Africa

Solutions to Water Scarcity in Africa

Remedies for water scarcity are observed on a local, national, and international scale. 

Local communities are taking adaptation action. Many opt for drought-tolerant crops instead of crops that require large amounts of water, a strategy to mitigate both water scarcity and food insecurity. Conservation or regenerative agriculture is also introduced to help infiltration and soil moisture retention through mulching and no-tillage approaches. Countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Ethiopia have all adopted such techniques in recent years.

Several governments are also taking steps to tackle water scarcity across the continent. For example, the government of Namibia financed the construction of a urban wastewater management in the capital Windhoek, significantly improving the management of water resources and thus lowering the risk of water scarcity. 

International organisations also lend a helping hand in times of water scarcity. In recent years, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) promoted several initiatives and implemented innovative financing model to alleviate this pressing issue. In regions in eastern and southern Africa, UNICEF is cooperating with the European Investment Bank (EIB), the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) and other international agencies and organisations to evaluate and implement bankable projects in a blended financing mode, particularly targeting the urban areas. For example , the European Union donated €19 million for the construction of water supply systems in the Eswatini’s cities of Siphofaneni, Somntongo, and Matsanjeni. Similarly, the DBSA contributed about €150 million to the construction of the Lomahasha Water Supply. Booster pumping stations as well as reinforced concrete reservoirs are also constructed with the support of international actors.

You might also like: One Woman’s Mission to Fight Water Scarcity in Africa

All in all, the water scarcity problem in Africa is likely to exacerbate under the ever-increasing water demand and rise in global temperatures. Tangible action from all parties is constantly required to tackle this massive problem. Individuals can equally play an important role in alleviating water scarcity in Africa by adopting a more environmental-friendly lifestyle and taking actions in their daily lives to mitigate the effect of climate change and they can develop mindful practises that help safe water, one of the most important resources for life on Earth.

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Water Scarcity & Health in Urban Africa

Julie Livingston is Julius Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. She is the author of Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (2019), Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (2012), and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (2005).

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Julie Livingston; Water Scarcity & Health in Urban Africa. Daedalus 2021; 150 (4): 85–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01874

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Water is the cornerstone of public health. Yet many people living in Africa's cities face serious challenges obtaining an adequate supply of clean water. This situation, which poses significant public health concerns, promises only to grow in magnitude in the coming years as rapid urbanization and climate change meet head-on to further constrain urban water provision. This essay explores the relationship between water supply and health in urban Africa through the lens of water scarcity and health as political relationships as much as environmental or technical phenomena. By bringing infectious diseases like cholera and chronic ailments like kidney disease into the same frame of analysis, this essay also directs attention beyond the overwhelming public health focus on microbial contamination to emergent forms of water-related illness and injury that proceed unchecked.

In 2014, as global attention was focused on the Ebola epidemic escalating in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, residents of Accra, Ghana, found themselves facing an older and more familiar foe. In June of that year, a ten-year-old girl was brought to the Ussher Polyclinic with severe diarrhea, which was soon confirmed by laboratory tests to be positive for cholera. Soon another case was confirmed: a fifty-three-year-old man who presented at Maamobi Polyclinic in a different neighborhood of Accra. 1 By August, as the epidemic reached its peak, Ghanaian authorities reported fifty-four confirmed cholera deaths in the city with hundreds of new cases each day, stressing the health system. 2 Meanwhile, commuters, traders, and other travelers carried the disease beyond the metropole and cases were detected throughout much of the country and beyond its borders. 3 By the time the outbreak was finally contained in January 2015, nearly 29,000 cases and 243 deaths had been recorded.

According to Ghanaian public health experts, the index cases for the epidemic were in neighborhoods they described as “unhygienic and unclean,” with reliance on public latrines and open defecation in some places. 4 Experts from the Disease Surveillance Department of the Ghanaian Health Service who went to investigate found that “the water supply system in these areas also had visible leakages in the pipes suggesting possible water contamination, since there was evidence of visible disposal of untreated sewage into open drains.“ 5 Lacking proper drainage, sewage and other refuse were dumped into the sea and gutters. ”Continuous water supply was another major problem in these areas. They mostly depend on the sachet water as the safest source of drinking water.“ 6 Ghanaian epidemiologists established that those with cholera had been six times more likely to have drank sachet water–that is, water packaged in 500 milliliter plastic pouches by private sellers and purchased on the street–than those without the disease. 7 It was only many weeks into the outbreak, when the government finally succeeded in providing safe water and toilets, that the epidemic began to subside.

A decade prior to the 2014 cholera outbreak in Ghana, anthropologist Sherine Hamdy sat in a dialysis ward in Tanta, Egypt's fifth-largest city. She was there researching an epidemic of a different nature, though one also related to dirty water. Tanta's dialysis patients were suffering from chronic kidney failure, the visible tip of a broad epidemic of kidney disease. For those lying tethered to the machines, dialysis was exhausting and time-consuming, but it was also iatrogenic. In the clinics where Hamdy worked, between 70 and 80 percent of patients had contracted Hepatitis C via the dialysis machines. Patients in these clinics blamed toxic drinking water and contaminated food for their ailments. They pointed to the dumping of pesticides and chemical runoff into the Nile. 8 This was an etiology echoed in the popular press, in which many authors pointed to the government's failure to properly regulate, monitor, and control industrial pollution, resulting in high rates of heavy metal and chemical contamination and attendant disease. 9 Indeed, some of the worst offenders were government-owned firms. 10

These two epidemics begin to suggest the scope and contours of the relationship between water and well-being in urban Africa. Water is the cornerstone of public health. Yet many people living in Africa's cities face serious challenges obtaining an adequate supply of clean water. This situation, which poses significant public health concerns, promises only to grow in magnitude in the coming years as rapid urbanization and climate change meet head-on to further constrain urban water provision.

The African continent has been urbanizing rapidly–a process that shows no signs of slowing. The sheer number of city dwellers has risen steadily over the past several decades as has the number and size of cities. In 2015, Dakar was home to as many people as the entire nation of Senegal had been only a half-century earlier. 11 By 2015, an estimated 567 million Africans–more than half the total population of the continent–were urbanites. Demographers project that within the next three decades, nearly one billion additional people will reside in Africa's cities. 12 Meanwhile, changing rainfall patterns and rising temperatures contribute to the challenge of providing adequate water for these rapidly growing populations. Already the number of cities with unreliable water supply and chronic shortages is rising. Water is a primary human need, yet it can carry microbial pathogens like cholera, typhoid, or E. coli, or be contaminated with pesticides, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, or other toxins, resulting in substantial bodily harm.

The experience of water-associated disease or injury is bleak. Diarrhea can be shameful, especially for people who must share communal toilets or who have no choice but open defecation. It can also be terrifying. Watching a child grow listless with dehydration. Feeling the water squeezed out of one's body at an alarming rate. Listen to how Mr. Madida, who suffered with cholera during an epidemic in South Africa in 2000, recalls that experience: “The hair still stands on its end and you feel the blood rush through all parts of the body each time when one thinks about that situation.” 13 Kidney disease, bladder cancer, and liver disease are no less frightening and no more comfortable; they just grind a person down in a different way over a longer period of agony, asking families to marshal different resources to care for their people.

A few preliminary figures help sketch the disturbing extent of these experiences. Tainted water is responsible for a significant amount of morbidity and mortality among urban Africans. Severe diarrheal disease accounts for some 600,000 deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of which afflict children and the elderly. 14 It is the third-leading cause of disease and death among African children under the age of five, a situation that public health authorities have long understood as an expression of the quality of water and sanitation. 15 Diarrheal disease is an umbrella term for disease caused by a range of waterborne pathogens including cholera, typhoid, amoebiasis, giardiasis, rotavirus, and E. coli. Other endemic waterborne afflictions include Hepatitis A and schistosomiasis, for which 11.7 million people in Africa were treated in 2008. 16 Schistosomiasis has historically been seen as a rural affliction, as Jennifer Derr documents in her contribution to this issue of Dædalus. 17 Yet in recent years, “rapid and disordered urbanization” has seen an expansion of the disease in urban areas. 18 Meanwhile, Tanta was not unique. A recent review names chronic kidney disease as a “substantial health burden” on the continent. 19 African epidemiologists note both rising rates of bladder cancer as well as an ongoing shift from the prevalence of subtypes caused by chronic schistosomiasis to those fostered by exposure to industrial chemicals. 20

The current epidemiological moment is a complex one. On the one hand, African cities are grappling with outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, endemic diarrheal disease, and other problems that arise from inadequate or broken water and sanitation systems, as happened in Accra in 2014. On the other hand, there are rising rates of debilitating disease and injury that are associated with chemical pollution, heavy metal poisoning, and other side effects of industrial water contamination like we saw in Tanta. This division is a false one. Health effects are tentacular and cascading. Chronic kidney disease can lead to Hepatitis C via dialysis as witnessed in Tanta. Repeated bouts of childhood diarrhea can exacerbate chronic malnutrition. The money spent purchasing water cannot be spent on necessary medications. The money spent purchasing medications for water-related disease cannot be spent purchasing nutritious food or adequate shelter. And as these two epidemics illustrate, the divide between urban and rural is porous. The city and its hinterland cannot be fully separated. Accra's cholera outbreak was quickly carried upcountry. Tanta's dialysis ward gathered poor patients from rural communities beyond Tanta to lie on machines next to factory workers from the city. Rural water pollution from the industrial use of chemical fertilizer moves up the Nile to Cairo. Even if city dwellers are drinking properly treated water, fish, grain, and vegetables laden with heavy metals and chemical pollutants harvested from downstream irrigation channels are carried to Cairene markets.

This essay explores the relationship between water supply and health in urban Africa through the lens of water scarcity and health as political relationships as much as environmental or technical phenomena. Anthropologist Nikhil Anand describes a kind of urban “belonging enabled by social and material claims made to the city's water infrastructure” that he calls “hydraulic citizenship.” 21 South African scholars Michela Marcatelli and Bram Buscher use the term “liquid violence” to describe the biopolitical condition in which “some people are systematically left without sufficient water.” 22 This biopolitical formulation is helpful for thinking about water and health together. Liquid violence flows through social and economic hierarchies, distributing water upward and cascading harm to those at the bottom. Water shortages plague cities like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, located on the banks of one of the world's largest rivers, or Harare, Zimbabwe, where, as Muchaparara Musemwa shows in this issue, once robust water infrastructure has fallen into disarray, undermining any sense that water distribution is a straightforward expression of supply. Meanwhile, as climate change directly challenges supply in cities like Cape Town, South Africa, Gaborone, Botswana, or Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the health effects of scarcity are not evenly distributed. Across the continent, wealthy, middle-class, and poor urbanites consume water at radically different scales, with negative health outcomes concentrated among the poor and working class. By bringing infectious disease like cholera and chronic ailments like kidney disease into the same frame of analysis, this essay also directs attention beyond the overwhelming public health focus on microbial contamination to emergent forms of water-related illness and injury that proceed unchecked. Just as Derr shows how endemic schistosomiasis became the assumed cost of development in mid-twentieth-century Egypt, in the twenty-first century, we might say the same for kidney disease and cancer. Africa is an enormous and diverse continent, and this discussion does not pretend to be comprehensive, but instead maps the contours of a complex situation affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Water distribution is a political phenomenon. It is shaped through technical practice and operates within environmental limits, but the choices over whether and where to lay and maintain pipes as well as regulations governing pollution and their enforcement are determined by political and economic interests. Among residents of African cities, not everyone experiences political recognition through the pipes; the burden of water-related illness falls disproportionately on poor and working-class people. Liquid violence manifests in the fact that some people live in a state of chronic water shortage, even as others in their same cities do not. As several authors in this issue elucidate, the causes of these inequities are complex and varied. 23 They range from mismanagement to corruption to budgetary and political pressures around cost recovery to the ongoing infrastructural legacies of colonial-era segregation and the technical challenges posed by the rapid growth of informal settlements sited some distance from the water mains. These dynamics are exacerbated by global climate change and pollution, which threaten water supply, a situation that promises to increase in the coming years.

Urban agglomerations on the continent range in scale from megacities with populations in the several millions like Lagos, Kinshasa, or Cairo to smaller secondary cities like Bulawayo, Kumasi, or Kisumu. Spontaneous growth means that many cities are over-spilling their administrative boundaries with peri-urban settlements emerging apace, sometimes engulfing previously rural villages. Across the urbanscape, cities draw from a range of water sources from rivers and dams to springs and wells, and residents rely on an array of procurement options that are determined by available infrastructure and service provision. In any African city, there are residents with piped water and indoor plumbing, and hotels with swimming pools, as well as people who must queue to collect or purchase water in small quantities for carefully rationed domestic use. Meanwhile, decades of urbanization have outstripped formal planning and service provision even as older infrastructure has fallen into disrepair.

Some two-thirds of urban Africans reside in informal settlements where municipal infrastructure has deteriorated or is lacking altogether, and where the costs of purchasing water are paradoxically higher than in more affluent neighborhoods. 24 Spontaneous population growth is especially concentrated in these underserved areas. For example, in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, the UN estimates that informal settlements account for 75 percent of urban growth. 25 These neighborhoods are the most challenged in terms of water access in a city where “84 percent of higher and middle income households have access to a piped water connection,” compared to only 36 percent of households in low-income neighborhoods. 26 Local water activists remind us that informal is a political designation, a manifestation of hydraulic citizenship as much as one marking the age of a particular neighborhood, and that the problems of liquid violence are long-standing. The Mathare Social Justice Center contends that:

By being marked as “informal,” and intentionally maintained like this, our home areas, particularly those called “slums,” are largely neglected by the government through the denial of basic rights and infrastructure. Even though, for example, Mathare has been around for close to 100 years, there is still no sufficient piped water infrastructure, or adequate housing and sanitation provisions. 27

Development experts had long recognized access to “improved water”–provided through systems that protect it from contamination, making it safe for drinking and other uses–as a cornerstone of public health and poverty alleviation. African governments and their international partners metricize improved water access as an index of economic and social development. Over the past half-century, various strategies and policy trends have been tried to increase access, resulting in a complex and diverse patchwork of policy and infrastructure across African cities. Municipal water systems have expanded in some cities. In others, like Harare or Kinshasa, they have broken down or contracted, sometimes with disastrous effects. 28

The first decade or so of the twenty-first century saw an extensive push for the liberalization of water services in many African cities. This rendered water an “economic good” under a policy vision that emphasized cost recovery for utilities. 29 Yet improved financing for water utilities did not necessarily result in an increase in coverage among low-income consumers. 30 Activists and community groups in some cities rejected further commercialization of water and popular protest succeeded in derailing outright privatization, as in the case of South Africa described later in this essay. 31 In some cities, public-private partnerships were set up. But private companies often concentrated service in wealthier neighborhoods, where they could expect better returns. 32 In yet other sites, there are community partnerships with publicly run utilities. For example, in Lilongwe, Malawi, a Water Users Association model was developed in 2006, based on “‘partnerships of necessity’ among overstretched, cash-starved [Water Boards], water-bill delinquent and poor peri-urban communities, and key NGOs in the water sector.” In this arrangement, the water boards license the community-based water users' associations to operate the communal water kiosks. The water boards supply the water and provide technical assistance. This program resulted in gains in water supply, improved maintenance, and better financial management. 33

Across this array of arrangements in cities throughout the continent, even in sites with improvement in shortages and service, interruptions continue to plague systems for improved water procurement. One woman in Lilongwe, Malawi, described to researchers an experience common to many in cities across the continent.

I wake up very early in the morning, sometimes around 5 am. Because some days I have to wait a long time at the kiosk, for up to 1 hour, before it is my turn to fetch water. Sometimes I wait for that long and I still come home without water because the water stopped flowing or it was time for the water kiosk attendant to close the kiosk. 34

Even when improved water is theoretically available, many people find themselves relying, in part, on unimproved sources.

Between 1990 and 2015, access to improved water in sub-Saharan African cities increased from 83 to 87 percent. Yet 94 percent of the richest quintile enjoyed access compared to only 64 percent of the poorest quintile. 35 In 2017, the World Bank narrowed the criteria for safe water, changing the standard from improved to specifically piped water. Yet in 2017, only 61 percent of all people in sub-Saharan African cities had access to piped water. Moreover, analysts caution that these numbers are likely inflated. First, they are calculated by geographic proximity to an improved source and fail to account for many factors that constrain access, like extensive wait times (of several hours) at water points or irregular supply. 36 According to African Utility corporations, nearly one-fifth of public standpipes are broken, though independent estimates put the figure at 58 percent. 37 Even those with a piped connection usually have intermittent flow into their taps. Second, piped water is not necessarily safe to consume. When tested at the point of collection, microbial contamination was often found in improved water sources. 38 And even if potable at collection, water quality begins to degrade or may become contaminated during transport and storage in open containers. Yet unreliable water connections cause people to store quantities of water for times when the taps are dry. Meanwhile, testing remains rare for heavy metals, chemicals, and other nonmicrobial industrial contaminants, like those that Tanta's dialysis patients suspect as having damaged their kidneys. Still many African cities rely on “high vulnerability” aquifers. 39

In any given city, residents may get their water from multiple sources. Municipal water systems are fragmented and partially privatized, with services arising ad hoc, and require people to combine strategies and modes of procurement and use. A water utility may officially provide water free to residential consumers, but be plagued with broken pipes, power blackouts, and other problems that require people to find other sources. As Matthew Bender documents in this issue, “multiple sourcing” is a crucial and long-standing strategy for households in Dar es Salaam. 40 There, as in many African cities, a single household might at various times send daughters to queue at a municipal tap for bulk water collection, collect rainwater in cisterns, and buy bottled water from a neighborhood vendor for drinking. Development scholar Florent Bédécarrats and colleagues give a sense of the heterogenous hydroscape that has developed as formal municipal services have fallen into disrepair or failed to keep pace with urban growth and a mosaic of improvisational initiatives emerges.

The gaps left by the main water utility have led to an increase in the number of alternative operators, both formal and informal. … These systems can be private or community-managed. They may depend on a third-party operator for their raw water or produce it independently. … Examples of this are the small-scale private operators in Maputo that provide water to their neighborhoods via “spaghetti” networks: flexible polyethylene pipes laid directly on the ground and fed from 40 m deep boreholes. … In Kisumu, Kenya, water supply to slums is ensured by associations. In Ouagadougou, the national public utility delegates the service for informal settlements to small operators. 41

This complex situation is difficult to fully apprehend. Mapping the scope and scale of both water access and illness are challenging and indeed self-referential. Epidemiological systems are uneven and stretched on the continent. Much disease goes unreported, as do many deaths. An epidemic of cholera like that described in Accra in 2014, given the acute and terrifying nature of the disease and its potentially rapid spread, draws the attention of the health service and its counting apparatus. Yet most of the estimated 1.4 million cholera cases in Africa each year go unreported, posing a problem for epidemiological surveillance. 42 Epidemiologists report that in 2017, there were 739,5000 cases of typhoid in Eastern Africa, and that sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 12 percent of typhoid globally. But these figures do not correspond to actual human beings diagnosed with typhoid, since many countries do not actively surveil the disease. 43 And for those who do, they most likely do not see all cases.

The figures for much water-related infections therefore, like those for childhood diarrhea, are necessarily generated through multifactorial models. These models use small cohort studies, as well as data on water and sanitation, to project cases of diarrhea or typhoid. 44 This is not to say that they should not be taken quite seriously. It is clear that the problems associated with waterborne pathogens are present and pressing. The smaller localized studies are telling. In 2006, the Chadian Department of Health surveyed residents of the capital N'djamena. Among households surveyed, they found only 61 percent of households had access to improved water, and that 27 percent of children under the age of five had suffered from diarrhea in the two weeks prior to being surveyed. Among babies six to eleven months, that figure rose to 40 percent. 45 But scaling up to large population data requires multifactorial modeling. Therefore, when access to improved water increases, rates of diarrhea and typhoid decrease, regardless of what may actually happen on the ground. Meanwhile, data on water and sanitation are often partial and open to manipulation or misinterpretation. As noted above, the presence of a standpipe does not necessarily mean that the standpipe is functioning. Thus, the figures have to be understood as political technologies in their own right.

Beyond infectious ailments, the situation grows far more opaque. There are enormous gaps in knowledge about the scope and scale of urban water-related illness and injury. A historical association of waterborne disease with microbial contamination has meant inattention to the relationship between water supply and the new epidemiology of cancer, kidney disease, and other chronic, if deadly, ailments on the rise in urban Africa. 46 These problems are more difficult but no less urgent to trace. Kidney disease cannot solely be attributed to exposure to polluted water; it is also, for example, related to rising rates of diabetes and hypertension. But recent studies have shown that although these comorbidities are the most common risks associated with chronic kidney disease “in middle-income and high-income countries,” in low-income contexts like much of urban Africa, “environmental and occupational exposure to pollutants remain common causes of kidney disease.” 47 Yet many studies of kidney disease in Africa fail to acknowledge the question of environmental and occupational exposures, much less take up these factors as an object of study. 48 One group of epidemiologists mapping the rising tide of kidney disease on the continent points to this problem: “Largerscale epidemiological studies are needed to examine many potential but currently unmeasured urban risk factors including contaminated water supplies.” 49

Nor should one imagine chronic kidney disease the only pathology associated with pesticide, chemical, and heavy metal contamination of the water supply. Bladder and other cancers, liver disease, neurological damage, Parkinson's disease, and congenital abnormalities are all associated with consumption of industrially contaminated water. People who experience these forms of contamination may correctly suspect and theorize their relationship to injury, as Sherine Hamdy found in Tanta's dialysis ward. 50 Yet epidemiological surveillance and the associated clinical and laboratory capacity necessary for accounting for these conditions and tracing levels of contamination have not kept pace with pollution, masking the extent of injury and obscuring culpability.

Within this unstable archipelago of service provision, many people, particularly those living in informal settlements, find themselves facing difficult decisions with serious secondary health effects. Imagine having to choose between purchasing clean water or using untreated water from a river or shallow well in order to save that money for rent. Imagine caring for children with repeated bouts of acute diarrhea while also having to queue two hours to procure the water necessary to bathe and otherwise clean up after them. Water scarcity threatens hygiene, which carries serious negative health consequences. The same neighborhoods that lack regular water access are often those that also lack adequate sanitation. Even so, sanitation is less easily purchased as a stopgap solution than water.

A look at packaged water helps to elucidate the negative secondary health effects of water scarcity. Bottled water, tanker trucks, and sachet water are all considered improved sources, and are increasingly important sources of drinking water. As supply interruptions increase due to water shortages and aging infrastructure, and as people move into neighborhoods that lack adequate water, a market in packaged water has stepped into the breach. In Ghana in 2008, a government study found that while 16.8 percent of urban households relied on packaged water as their primary source of drinking water, within a decade, this had risen to 53.6 percent. 51 Yet as Accra's cholera epidemic makes clear, even improved water, like that purchased in sealed plastic sachets, can carry deadly pathogens. Recent studies of sachet water samples have found E. coli, fecal coliforms, protozoa, salmonella, and other pathogens. 52 Even when safe to drink, packaged water carries secondary health effects. One study reported that water sachets, along with similar bags used for ice cream, contribute 85 percent of the 270 tons of plastic waste produced in Ghana each day. “The accumulation of plastic clogs water drainage pathways and exacerbates flood conditions in low-lying neighborhoods. For many low-income neighborhoods, flooded drains ultimately lead to increased risk of exposure to untreated sewage, animal waste, and runoff from urban agriculture.” 53

Any assessment of the health impact of packaged water must take into account the burden its cost places on households that already face difficult choices in providing for basic needs. Due to the patchwork and ad hoc nature of services, water pricing is regressive in many cities, costing poor people much more than their wealthy neighbors. Water from private vendors is much more expensive than provided by formal utilities, yet it is the poor who must rely most heavily on this market. In the small Nigerian city of Yenagoa, environmental scholars Odafivwotu Ohwo and Abel Abatuto found that households “spent an average of N4,500 ($22.60) per month” buying water from private vendors. This was approximately one-quarter of the monthly minimum wage. 54 In a different study in Lagos, Ohwo documents how consumers in poor neighborhoods, which are further from the water mains, pay as much as four times the price for water as those in wealthy neighborhoods. 55 In the Malawian capitol, Lilongwe, residents of informal settlements pay “at least twice as much for water as those in high-income urban neighborhoods.” 56 In Nairobi, consumers pay ten times as much for vendor-delivered water than for water piped into private homes. 57

Poor households have very little elasticity in their budgets. Even a subtle rise in the price of water, whether packaged or delivered by other means, has the potential to create scarcity among the poor with cascading negative health effects, while often failing to discipline the consumption habits of those with money to spare. Consider, for example, the case of South Africa, where access to water is enshrined as a human right in the constitution, where the legacy of apartheid continues to structure differential access to water, and where social movements demanding water underscore that poor people understand clearly the place of hydraulic citizenship in the politics of water scarcity and distribution. 58 In the 2000s, as part of the implementation of the 1998 Water Act, new policies shifted from flat-rate charges to metered billing. Utilities disconnected many township customers who were in arrears, and water utilities began installing prepaid water meters, which would shut off taps until payments were made. These measures focused on cost recovery from and rationalizing use by poor Black communities, rather than progressive policies that would recover costs from and rationalize or even limit ongoing excessive water consumption in wealthy, predominantly White households or commercial endeavors.

In 2000, authorities in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, introduced a fee for water, causing impoverished residents who lacked coins for the metered tap to turn instead to unimproved water sources. A cholera epidemic soon emerged and spread. Within eight months, hospitals, clinics, and rehydration centers had treated more than 82,000 cases. 59 By the time it was over, 265 people had died. 60 In the epidemic's wake, the government began a free basic water policy that gave each household a guaranteed minimum of 6 kiloliters of water a month, above which they would have to pay. Yet as researchers from South Africa's Municipal Services Project point out, this policy was not enough to prevent a water-associated typhoid outbreak in 2005 in the peri-urban town of Delmas, just outside the industrial belt of the East Rand. There, poorly managed sanitation affected water quality. These researchers also found that in rural KwaZulu-Natal, many people were still living with continuing cycles of water-related disease due to cost and service interruptions. In some cases, the free basic minimum was only intermittently provided. 61

Township residents protested the meters and, in 2008, in the Phiri neighborhood of Soweto, a group of activist residents took the city of Johannesburg to court, arguing that the policy violated their constitutional rights. The case was won, and then reversed on appeal, though in its wake, the city of Johannesburg raised the monthly minimum per household. But for purposes of this discussion, the examples brought by the plaintiffs suggest the extent of secondary effects. In the most tragic case, two children burned to death in their shack as neighbors bailed water from a ditch because they were unable to coax water from the meter, which had shut off for lack of credit. Another plaintiff explained that she cared for a relative with AIDS who was stricken with diarrhea. After the installation of the meter, she could not afford enough water to properly bathe her patient and launder her bed linens and clothing, an impossible situation. 62

Even when a basic minimum is provided, commodification shifts the moral economy of water, further undermining an ethos of care and collective responsibility among neighbors. Take, for example, the findings of a study conducted in Khayelitsha, a large township in Cape Town, where shack dwellers live among formal dwellings. Approximately two-thirds of households have access to piped water either inside the home or at a tap in the yard. Researchers found that residents became unwilling to share water with neighbors once they had their own tap. When researchers asked shack dwellers about asking for water from neighbors when the communal tap was broken or dry, many expressed discomfort and some cited past conflicts. One woman said, “she can only ask for very small amounts of water, because there is general sense in the community that payment for water will commence in the near future.” Another noted, “It is not easy, but we still ask because we need the water. Maybe we go ask them with a bucket, but you cannot ask for a lot or more than a bucket. … They say they pay for the water. They rent this water so you must come with a small bucket to pour water in for you.” 63 This kind of erosion of resource-sharing among neighbors further strains already fragile safety nets upon which people rely in times of illness. Such nets are especially important in contexts where chronic illnesses like HIV/AIDS or chronic kidney disease require sustained caregiving over many weeks, months, and even years.

The metering and pricing policies were not enough to prevent a water shortage crisis in Cape Town in 2018, as several years of severe drought steadily drained and ultimately threatened to collapse the city's water supply. This culminated in a municipal crisis, with a looming threat of a “Day Zero” when the water would cease. Severe use restrictions were put in place, and water consumption dropped significantly. Yet as anthropologist Steve Robins shows, wealthier residents were able to drill wells and boreholes to supplement their supply, while poor and working-class residents could not. Antiprivatization activists in the city had long pointed to inequities of consumption, suggesting the poor were hardly the cause of water scarcity. Researchers from the University of Cape Town found that to be the case: “in 2017, informal settlements had used a mere 4.7 per cent of the total water available, compared to middle-class suburbs, which accounted for roughly 70 per cent of domestic water used.” 64

As this essay has described, urban water scarcity is a complex phenomenon encompassing environmental, technical, political, and economic arrangements, which concentrate illness and harm among the poor and working class. Looking ahead, anthropogenic climate change threatens to increase the number of people in Africa's cities vulnerable to the cascading health effects of water scarcity. Cape Town's experience reminds us that these vulnerabilities will not be equally distributed. Across the continent, many cities find surface water supply challenged by an escalating drought cycle and increasing temperatures that accelerate evaporation, as happened in Cape Town. Though the rains have returned to southwest Africa and the dams are currently full, scientists caution this is a temporary reprieve and predict the drought cycle to return, part of a projected trend of a “drying sub-Saharan Africa.” 65 Anthropogenic changes are complex, as is the relationship between urbanization and climate change. Escalating drought cycles drive rural families from the land and into the cities, part of the tide of urbanization and the growth of informal settlements. Urbanization, in turn, means more people are consuming water, increasing demand and pressuring supply.

Urbanization is also terraforming in ways that negatively affect supply. In cities that rely primarily on groundwater, as former farmland and bush are cleared for dense settlement, groundwater recharge is slowed. 66 But water scarcity cannot only be understood by a simple turn to quantity. Unchecked industrial contamination of aquifers and rivers also threatens water supply over the long term. In the mining area of Johannesburg, for example, many of the aquifers are “clogged up with acid mine drainage,” rendering them unusable. 67 In Thiaroye on the Dakar peninsula, nitrate from septic systems has polluted the shallow aquifer, which is tapped for drinking water. 68 In Kisumu, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, and psychiatric drugs, as well as the antiretroviral nevirapine, are now present in ground water. 69 Across the African urbanscape, while the threat of diarrheal disease remains high, the damaged kidney may be a sentinel for another source of water scarcity: anthropogenic pollution.

Kennedy Ohene-Adjei, Ernest Kenu, Delia Akosua Bandoh, et al., “Epidemiological Link of a Major Cholera Outbreak in Greater Accra Region of Ghana, 2014,” BMC Public Health 17 (11) (2017), https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-017-4803-9 .

Reuters, “Ghana: Cholera Outbreak Kills Dozens,” The New York Times , August 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/world/africa/ghana-cholera-outbreak-kills-dozens.html .

Ohene-Adjei et al., “Epidemiological Link of a Major Cholera Outbreak in Greater Accra Region of Ghana, 2014.”

Emmanuel Dzotsi, John Kofi Odoom, Joseph K. L. Opare, and Bernard B. K. Davies-Teye, “Outbreak of Cholera, Greater Accra Region, Ghana, 2014,” Journal of Scientific Research & Reports 9 (3) (2014): 19.

Sherine Hamdy, “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail: Political Etiologies in an Egyptian Dialysis Ward,” American Ethnologist 35 (4) (2008).

Isabel Bottoms, “World Water Day: Egypt's Polluted Waters,” Mada , March 22, 2014, https://madamasr.com/en/2014/03/22/opinion/u/world-water-day-egypts-polluted-waters/ ; Hassan Abdel Zaher, “The Nile, a Vital Source of Water, Turns into Source of Disease,” The Arab Weekly , September 18, 2015, https://thearabweekly.com/nile-vital-source-water-turns-source-disease ; and “Sugar Factory Pollutes Egypt's Nile River Spreads Death,” Arab Reports for Investigative Journalism , February 8, 2010, https://en.arij.net/investigation/sugar-factory-pollutes-egypts-nile-river-spreads-death/ .

“Sugar Factory Pollutes Egypt's Nile River Spreads Death.”

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and Sahel and West Africa Club Secretariat, Africa's Urbanisation Dynamics 2020: Africapolis, Mapping a New Urban Geography (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2020), 62, https://doi.org/10.1787/b6bccb81-en .

Remy Nnadozie and David Hemson, “Still Paying the Price: Revisiting the Cholera Epidemic of 2000–2001,” Municipal Services Project, Occasional Paper No. 10, South African Human Sciences Research Council, February 2006, 17.

Christopher Troeger, Brigette F. Blacker, Ibrahim A. Khalil, et al., “Estimates of the Global, Regional, and National Morbidity, Mortality, and Aetiologies of Diarrrhoea in 195 Countries: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016,” Lancet Infectious Disease 18 (11) (2018): 1211–1228, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(18)30362-1/fulltext .

Robert C. Reiner, Jr., Nicholas Graetz, Daniel C. Casey, et al., “Variation in Childhood Diarrheal Morbidity and Mortality in Africa, 2000–2015,” New England Journal of Medicine 379 (2018): 1128–1138.

Abiola Fatimah Adenwo, Babatunde Emmanuel Oyinloye, Bolajoko Idiat Ogunyinka, and Abidemi Paul Kappo, “Impact of Human Schistosomiasis in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Brazilian Journal of Infectious Diseases 19 (2) (2015): 196–205.

Jennifer L. Derr, “The Dammed Body: Thinking Historically about Water Security & Public Health,” Dædalus 150 (4) (Fall 2021).

Abdoulaye Dabo, Adama Z. Diarra, Vanessa Machault, et al., “Urban Schistomiasis and Associated Determinant Factors among School Children in Bamako, Mali, West Africa,” Infectious Diseases of Poverty 4 (4) (2015), https://doi.org/10.1186/2049-9957-4-4 .

John W. Stanifer, Bocheng Jing, Scott Tolan, et al., “The Epidemiology of Chronic Kidney Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Lancet Global Health 2 (3) (2014): 174.

K. Bowa, C. Mulele, E. Manda, et al., “A Review of Bladder Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Different Disease, with a Distinct Presentation, Assessment, and Treatment,” Annals of African Medicine 17 (3) (2018): 99–105; and Davies Adeloye, “Estimate of the Incidence of Bladder Cancer in Africa: A Systematic Review and Bayesian Meta-Analysis,” International Journal of Urology 26 (2019): 102–112.

Nikhil Anand, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

Bram Buscher and Michela Marcatelli, “Liquid Violence: The Politics of Water Responsibilisation and Dispossession in South Africa,” Water Alternatives 12 (2) (2019): 760–773.

See Muchaparara Musemwa, “Urban Struggles over Water Scarcity in Harare,” Dædalus 150 (4) (Fall 2021); Matthew V. Bender, “Water for Bongo: Creative Adaptation, Resilience & Dar es Salaam's Water Supply,” Dædalus 150 (4) (Fall 2021); and Harry Verhoeven, “The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Africa's Water Tower, Environmental Justice & Infrastructural Power,” Dædalus 150 (4) (Fall 2021). See also Tom McCaskie, “Water Wars in Kumasi, Ghana,” in Competing Claims on Urban Spaces , ed. Francesca Locatelli and Paul Nugent (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009).

S. Dos Santos, E. A. Adams, G. Neville, et al., “Urban Growth and Water Access in Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress, Challenges, and Emerging Research Directions,” Science of the Total Environment 607–608 (2017): 499.

UN Habitat, State of the World's Cities 2012/2013: Prosperity of Cities (Nairobi: UN Habitat, 2013).

Prince K. Guma, Jochen Monstadt, and Sophie Schramm, “Hybrid Constellations of Water Access in the Digital Age: The Case of Jisomee Mita in Soweto-Kayole, Nairobi,” Water Alternatives 12 (2) (2019): 636.

Mathare Social Justice Center, “Maji Ni Uhai, Maji Ni Haki: Eastlands Residents Demand Their Right to Water” (Nairobi: Mathare Social Justice Center, 2018), 4, https://www.matharesocialjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/MajiNiHaki_Report_MSJCFinal_Web.pdf .

Musemwa, “Urban Struggles over Water Scarcity in Harare”; and Simukai Chigudu, “The Politics of Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Urban Zimbabwe: ‘People Were Dying Like Flies,‘” African Affairs 118 (472) (2019): 413–434.

Karen Bakker, Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World's Urban Water Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010).

Marta Marson and Ivan Savin, “Ensuring Sustainable Access to Drinking Water in Sub Saharan Africa: Conflict Between Financial and Social Objectives,” World Development 76 (2015): 26–39.

Dale T. McKinley, “The Struggle against Water Privatisation in South Africa,” in Reclaiming Public Water: Achievements, Struggles and Visions from Around the World , ed. Belén Balanyá (Amsterdam: The Transnational Institute, 2005); and Jackie Dugard and Elisabeth Koek, “Water Wars: Anti-Privatization Struggles in the Global South,” in International Environmental Law and the Global South , ed. Shawkat Alam, Sumudu Atapattu, Carmen Gonzalez, and Jona Razzaque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 496–490.

Ellis Adjei Adams, Daniel Sambu, and Sarah Smiley, “Urban Water Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa: Historical and Emerging Policies and Institutional Arrangements,” International Journal of Water Resources Development 35 (2) (2019): 240–263.

Ellis Adjei Adams and Leo Charles Zulu, “Participants or Customers in Water Governance? Community-Public Partnerships for Peri-Urban Water Supply,” Geoforum 65 (2015): 112–124.

Ellis Adjei Adams, “Thirsty Slums in African Cities: Household Water Insecurity in Urban Informal Settlements of Lilongwe, Malawi,” International Journal of Water Resources Development 34 (6) (2018): 877.

Adams et al., “Urban Water Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa,” 247. See also Frederick Ato Armah, Bernard Ekumah, David Oscar Yawson, et al., “Access to Improved Water and Sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa in a Quarter Century,” Heliyon 4 (11) (2018): 25, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00931 .

Adams, “Thirsty Slums in African Cities.”

Adams et al., “Urban Water Supply in Sub-Saharan Africa,” 248.

Ibid.; and Johan Enqvist, Gina Ziervogel, Luke Metelerkamp, et al., “Informality and Water Justice: Community Perspectives on Water Issues in Cape Town's Low-Income Neighbourhoods,” International Journal of Water Resources Development (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2020.1841605 .

D. J. Lapworth, D. C. W. Nkhuwa, J. Okotto-Okotto, et al., “Urban Groundwater Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Current Status and Implications for Water Security and Public Health,” Hydrogeology Journal 25 (2017): 1093–1116, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10040-016-1516-6 .

Bender, “Water for Bongo.”

Florent Bédécarrats, Oriane Lafuente-Sampietro, Martin Lemenager, and Dominique Lukono Sowa, “Building Commons to Cope with Chaotic Urbanization? Performance and Sustainability of Decentralized Water Services in the Outskirts of Kinshasa,” Journal of Hydrology 573 (2019): 1096.

Martin Mengel, Isabelle Delrieu, Leonard Heyerdahl, and Bradford Gessner, “Cholera Outbreaks in Africa,” Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology 379 (2014): 117–144, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24827501/ .

Megan E. Carey and A. Duncan Steele, “The Severe Typhoid Fever in Africa Program Highlights the Need for Broad Deployment of Typhoid Conjugate Vaccines,” Clinical Infectious Disease 69 (Supplement 6) (2019): S413–S416.

Jeffrey D. Stanaway, Robert C. Reiner, Brigette F. Blacker, et al., “The Global Burden of Typhoid and Paratyphoid Fevers: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017,” Lancet Infectious Disease 19 (4) (2019): 369–381.

Julien Ntouda, Fondo Sikodf, Mohamadou Ibrahim, and Ibrahim Abba, “Access to Drinking Water and Health of Populations in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Comptes Rendus Biologies 336 (2013): 305–309.

Eve Mackinnon, Richard Ayah, Richard Taylor, et al., “21st Century Research in Urban WASH and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa: Methods and Outcomes in Transition,” International Journal of Environmental Health Research 29 (4) (2019): 463–464.

Xin Xu, Sheng Nie, Hanying Ding, and Fan Fan Hou, “Environmental Pollution and Kidney Diseases,” Nature Reviews Nephrology 14 (2018): 313–324.

See, for example, Amin Roshdy Soliman, Ahmed Fathy, and Dalia Roshd, “The Growing Burden of End-Stage Renal Disease in Egypt,” Renal Failure 34 (4) (2012): 425–428; and Mostafa Abdel-Fattah El-Ballat, Mohamed Ahmed El-Sayed, and Hossman Kame Abdel-Raouf Eman, “Epidemiology of End Stage Renal Disease Patients on Hemodialysis in El-Beheira Governorate, Egypt,“ Egyptian Journal of Hospital Medicine 76 (3) (2019): 3618–3625.

Jaya A. George, Jean-Tristan Brandenburg, June Fabian, et al., “Kidney Damage and Associated Risk Factors in Rural and Urban Sub-Saharan Africa (AWI-Gen): A Cross-Sectional Population Study,” Lancet Global Health 7 (2019): e1642.

Hamdy, “When the State and Your Kidneys Fail.”

Maxwell Semey, Winfred Dotse-Gborgbotsi, Mawuli Dzodzomenyo, and Jim Wright, “Characteristics of Packaged Water Production Facilities in Greater Accra, Ghana: Implications for Water Safety and Associated Environmental Impacts,” Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 10 (1) (2020): 146.

Asli Aslan, Haresh Rochani, Oghenekpaobor Oyibo, et al., “Sources of Microbial Contamination in Sachet Water from Ghana,” Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 10 (2) (2020): 202. See also McCaskie, “Water Wars in Kumasi, Ghana.”

Justin Stoler, John R. Weeks, and Gunther Fink, “Sachet Drinking Water in Ghana's Accra-Tema Metropolitan Area: Past, Present, and Future,” Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 2 (4) (2012): 223–240.

Odafivwotu Ohwo and Abel Abotutu, “Access to Potable Water Supply in Nigerian Cities Evidence from Yanagoa Metropolis,” American Journal of Water Resources 2 (2) (2014): 31–36, cited in Odafivwotu Ohwo, “Challenges of Public Water Provision in Nigerian Cities: A Review,” Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development 6 (1) (2016): 1–12.

Ibid., 9–10.

Adams, “Thirsty Slums in African Cities,” 872.

See Heinz Klug, “Between Principles & Power: Water Law Principles & the Governance of Water in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Dædalus 150 (4) (Fall 2021); Antina Von Schnitzer, Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016); Patrick Bond and Jackie Dugard, “Water, Human Rights and Social Conflict: South African Experiences,” Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal 1 (2008), http://www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/2008_1/bond_dugard ; McKinley, “The Struggle against Water Privatisation in South Africa”; and Dugard and Koek, “Water Wars.”

Charles Mugero and Akm Hoque, “Review of Cholera Epidemic in South Africa, with Focus on KwaZulu-Natal Province, August 2000–11 April 2001,” April 11, 2001, http://www.kznhealth.gov.za/cholerareview.pdf .

Nnadozie and Hemson, “Still Paying the Price.”

Antina Von Schnitzer, “Performing Dignity: Human Rights, Citizenship, and the Techno-Politics of Law in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 41 (2) (2014): 341. Bond and Dugard explain the fire in their piece, “Water, Human Rights and Social Conflict.” In Nairobi, activists also point to the problem of fires.

Lucy Rodina, “Human Right to Water in Khayelitsha, South Africa–Lessons from a ‘Lived Experiences’ Perspective,” Geoforum 72 (2016): 63.

Steven Robins, “‘Day Zero,‘ Hydraulic Citizenship and the Defence of the Commons in Cape Town: A Case Study of the Politics of Water and Its Infrastructures,” Journal of Southern African Studies 45 (1) (2019): 18.

Salvatore Pascal, Sarah Kapnick, Thomas Delworth, and William Cooke, “Increasing Risk of Another Cape Town ‘Day Zero’ Drought in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (47) (2020): 29495–29503.

Michael Adelana, A. Tamiru, Daniel Nkhuwa, et al., “Urban Groundwater Management and Protection in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Applied Ground Water Studies in Africa , ed. Segun M. A. Adelana and Alan M. MacDonald (London: Taylor and Francis, 2008), 231–260.

Maxwell Musingafi, “Fresh Water Sources Pollution: A Human Related Threat to Fresh Water Security in South Africa,” Journal of Public Policy and Governance 1 (2) (2014): 78.

Nicole Burri, Robin Weatherl, Christian Moeck, and Mario Schirmer, “A Review of Threats to Groundwater Quality in the Anthropocene,” Science of the Total Environment 684 (2019): 146.

Ibid., 148.

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Water scarcity in South Africa threatens the agricultural sector and food security

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24th April 2024

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South Africa is naturally a water-scarce country – among the 30 driest countries in the world. But, combined with unpredictable climate changes that tend towards hotter and drier conditions, diminishing water tables, and the chronic mismanagement of water systems, water availability is becoming a cause for concern across all sectors of the economy. 

Few sectors are, however, impacted as severely as agriculture. Field crops, fruits and vegetables rely heavily on irrigation, and combined, these crops mean that 33% of South Africa’s total farming income is directly dependent on irrigation. The livestock sector, which accounts for 43% of gross farming income, also requires water to keep animals hydrated and grow crops for feed and processing. 

Africa is headed for bearing the brunt of food and water shortages

A concerning study recently published by the Center for Global Development¹ found that if climate change continues its current trend, 50 million Africans are likely to be pushed into water distress by 2050, which means that the quantity of water they will have access to is too little to meet their needs. With a higher demand for water resources than what’s available, water prices will skyrocket across Africa if significant steps are not taken to mitigate climate change and make water-saving a way of life.

John Hudson, Head of Agriculture at Nedbank, says that the high cost and limited availability of freshwater is driving the agricultural sector to find cost-effective ways to use water more efficiently. ‘Water is a limited resource and is not renewable, unlike electricity powered by solar, wind and hydro. So, we need to find ways to use less water to produce more food.’

A study published by the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEPFI) suggests that South Africa may experience a reduction of 10% in average rainfall as soon as next year, reducing surface water runoff by up to 50% to 75%. Fortunately, it is very possible to increase a farm’s resilience to water scarcity. Low-cost and high-impact methods include improving soil health through conservation agriculture practices such as no-till farming, mulching and composting, and harvesting rain and stormwater or using grey water for irrigation.

‘At Nedbank we’ve long advocated for regenerative agriculture – a practice that involves building soil health, improving water management and using practices that reduce irrigation demands. By simply restoring the health of soil, its water retention properties increase considerably – so much so that the Unites States National Resource Defence Council estimates that a 1% increase in soil organic matter (an indicator of soil health) increases water storage potential by more than 187 000 litres per hectare,’ says Hudson.

Of course, water and food security are intrinsically linked, and the Center for Global Development research indicates that crop production in Africa will decline by 2,9% in 2030 and by 18% by 2050 if nothing is done to mitigate climate change. This will result in about 200 million people facing extreme hunger by 2050, while crop revenue loss of approximately 30% will cause a rise in poverty of between 20% and 30% compared to a no-climate-change scenario.

Make every drop count

Hudson says the evidence is overwhelming that we must do everything we can to save water while there is water to save. ‘While regenerative agriculture is a proven tool to ensure that the water storage capability of soil is maximised and improved water management reduces water usage and costs, farmers also need to ensure they’re getting the most out of the water they are using. A host of tech exists to enable this, including increasingly sophisticated irrigation systems. 

A little-known fact is that a well-designed centre-pivot irrigation system offers 80% to 95% efficiency in application² compared to around 70% for flood systems and other sprinkler irrigation methods. This improved efficiency is what prompted Nedbank to partner with Agrico, the leading manufacturer in South Africa, to offer enhanced financing options for new centre-pivot irrigation systems. ‘Our partnership is making this technology more accessible for our clients, as we offer finance of up to 100% of the cost of the system at preferential interest rates over financing periods of up to 10 years.’

Agrico’s centre-pivot irrigation systems offer numerous benefits to ensure that every drop of this precious resource is used optimally. Nozzles uniformly distribute precise amounts of water with minimal losses due to run-off and evaporation. This prevents overwatering and ensures that the correct levels of moisture are maintained in the soil. 

The system is also compatible with LEPA (Low Energy Precise Application), which places sprinklers much closer to the ground and reduces the spacing between them to maintain irrigation uniformity. This means water is placed directly at the root zone, greatly reducing evaporation caused by strong winds or high temperatures. 

The Agrico Web Control system is another game changer, offering farmers real-time monitoring and automation of their systems via an app on any smart device from anywhere in the world. Through this platform, it is possible to adjust the water delivered by adjusting the speed of the pivot, while variable speed drives (VSDs) enable users to adjust the running speed of the pumps to adjust the flow and pressure output, delivering water efficiency at the touch of a screen. Using the latest GPS technology, centre pivots also shine in uneven topographies. Combined with the latest control software, the pressure of water supplied to the machine can be adjusted according to its position, also resulting in major energy savings.

Join the climate resilience conversation at Nampo

Ways to mitigate the water crisis in the agricultural sector and more will be debated at the Nedbank stand and on the Nation in Conversation stage at Grain SA’s Nampo Harvest Day in Bothaville from 14 to 17 May 2024. Discussions will centre around key issues, including the roles of generative artificial intelligence, digital innovation and e-commerce in the sector, climate resilience and transformation, and the value and importance of partnerships throughout the agricultural value chain. Agrico’s irrigation technology will also be on display at Nampo, and the team will be offering demos of their web control system.

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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• EO Explorer

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Severe Drought in Southern Africa

February 2024 JPEG

A prolonged dry spell in southern Africa in early 2024 scorched crops and threatened food security for millions of people. The drought has been fueled in large part by the ongoing El Niño, which shifted rainfall patterns during the growing season.

From late January through mid-March, parts of Southern Africa received half or less of their typical rainfall, according to researchers at the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. February 2024 was especially dry. The map above shows the amount of rainfall during that month, as a percent of normal (from 1981-2024). The map is based on the Climate Hazards Center InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS).

Precipitation would normally be highest from December through February. But CHC researchers analyzing CHIRPS data found that February 2024 was the driest February in the 40-year data record for an area spanning much of Zambia, Zimbabwe, southeastern Angola, and northern Botswana.

The parched conditions came at a critical time when crops need ample water supply for growth and to produce grain. Insufficient rain and high temperatures resulted in crop failure in several countries. By the end of February, maize (corn) crops had withered and died on 1 million hectares in central and southern Zambia—almost half of the country’s maize-growing area.

The dry spell also affected livestock. Over 9,000 drought-related cattle deaths were reported in Zimbabwe, and over 1.4 million cattle are considered at high risk of drought conditions and death due to a lack of pasture and water.

Researchers at the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) have been tracking rainfall and crop conditions in southern Africa throughout the growing season, which runs from about November to April. FEWS NET is a program supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in partnership with other agencies , including NASA.

March 2024 JPEG

The map above shows soil moisture conditions at the root zone—an estimate of how much water is available for crops—in southern Africa for March 2024. Orange and red areas depict deficits in soil moisture. Data for the map come from the FEWS NET Land Data Assimilation System , which uses observational datasets and seasonal climate forecasts to provide monthly forecasts of hydrological conditions relevant to food security in Africa and the Middle East.

Maize is the single most important cereal crop in southern Africa, accounting for a majority of the region’s cereal production and 21 percent of the average person’s diet. Its success or failure can affect the amount of food available. FEWS NET experts estimated in March 2024 that millions of people faced “ crisis level ” food insecurity in Zimbabwe, Malawi, central Mozambique, and Madagascar. This level means that households are not able to meet their minimum food needs without seeking humanitarian food assistance or taking drastic measures such as selling essential assets.

Before the 2024 growing season, FEWS NET scientists had identified southern Africa as a region of concern . An October 2023 report cited past research showing that during years with a moderate to strong El Niño, the region has often seen below-normal rainfall and above-average daytime temperatures during key months of the growing season, reducing yields of maize.

“Based on our modeling and previous research on El Niño and crop yields, we were able to issue advanced warning of this drought back in the fall of 2023,” said Amy McNally, a FEWS NET researcher based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Scientists with FEWS NET and the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning shared the 2024 growing season forecast with humanitarian aid organizations, bringing attention to the potential drought, reduced crop harvests, and exacerbation of already inflated maize prices. “This allowed USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance to aim to have emergency food assistance resources allocated ahead of time,” McNally said.

Falling crop harvests and water shortages led to Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe declaring national disasters. Water for drinking and cooking has become scarcer as the region deals with an ongoing cholera outbreak.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has forecast dry conditions and below-normal rainfall until June 2024 for much of southern Africa. Many farmers in the region are either in or approaching the time of crop harvest, so the full impacts of the failed season are yet to be felt.

Although there may be no relief on the horizon for crop production in the near term, next year may have more favorable conditions. The April ENSO forecast indicates that there is an 85 percent likelihood of a La Niña developing in late 2024 and early 2025, which is often associated with above-normal precipitation and normal or above-normal maize yields in southern Africa.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang , using data from the Climate Hazards Center , at the University of California, Santa Barbara. FEWS NET data on drought and food insecurity are available on their data portal ; FEWS NET Land Data Assimilation System data products can also be accessed through NASA’s website and the NASA Giovanni portal . Story by Emily Cassidy .

View this area in EO Explorer

One of the driest growing seasons in decades has decimated crops and left millions hungry.

Image of the Day for April 23, 2024

Image of the Day Land Water Drought

View more Images of the Day:

References & Resources

• The Associated Press (2024, February 29) Fresh from a deadly cholera outbreak, Zambia declares drought a national emergency . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• Climate Hazards Center, University of California, Santa Barbara (2024, March 24) Southern Africa Hit with Driest February on Record in Central Areas . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) (2023, October 3) Strong El Niño event will contribute to high food assistance needs through 2024 . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) (2024, March) Record dryness in February significantly lowers harvest prospects across the region . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning (2023, August 24) El Niño 2023/2024 Anticipated Climate and Agricultural Yield Impacts . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning (2024, April 4) Special Alert: El Niño-induced record dry spell threatens agricultural production outcomes across Southern Africa and raises concerns for food security . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (2024, April 10) Southern Africa drought: Impacts on maize production . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2023, October 30) El Niño Forecast to Contribute to Food Insecurity . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• PBS News Hour (2024, April 14) Extreme drought plunges southern Africa into hunger crisis . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (2024, March 13) Southern Africa: El Niño, Positive Indian Ocean Dipole Forecast and Humanitarian Impact (February 2024) . Accessed April 22, 2024.
• U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (2024, February) Humanitarian Snapshot: USAID/BHA in Southern Africa . Accessed April 22, 2024.

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