Building Resilient Water Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa

Building Resilience: Infrastructure, Information, and Institutions

Pressures on Africa’s water systems are escalating. Water demands are mounting more rapidly in Sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else on Earth. The World Resources Institute calculates that total regional water use will soar 163 percent by mid-century, driven by surging agricultural and domestic requirements. Water claims from industry and manufacturing are expected to skyrocket, nearly quadrupling from 2010 to 2050. Regional population is projected to climb 79 percent by 2054, adding another 981 million people. Much of this growth will occur in cities, often in sprawling informal settlements and intermediary towns lacking public services and infrastructure capacities. The population living in urban areas with perennial water shortages could spike sixfold to reach 162 million in 2050. Such trajectories raise the specter of increasing competition among different users for limited resources, forcing thorny trade-offs between prioritizing household demands and furnishing the water needed by agriculture and industry.

As water demands balloon, strains on water supplies are also worsening. The frequency of droughts has tripled across Sub-Saharan Africa since the 1970s, and flooding surged more than tenfold. The longstanding policy presumption that water supply and demand can be managed within stable boundaries of historic variability no longer holds. Soaring demand and extreme hydrological volatility will increasingly whipsaw water decisionmakers with confounding social and environmental uncertainties. Depending upon the models and scenarios analyzed, differing projections foresee that the number of people around the region suffering water stress could spike up to 921 million or fall by 429 million by 2050.

Realizing water security in this landscape of shifting pressures and unpredictable disruptions will place a premium on flexible and resilient approaches that can succeed across a range of potential futures and advance common goals among multiple stakeholders. Resilience for water security can be defined as the ability of people and systems to anticipate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses in a manner that reduces vulnerability, protects livelihoods, accelerates and sustains recovery, and supports economic and social development. Resilience entails building capacities within institutions, systems, and societies to address evolving risks and their underlying causes. To deal with risks, three resilience capacities are vital: (1) absorptive capacities—to prevent, mitigate, and withstand stresses; (2) adaptive capacities to create diverse options for adjusting and rebounding; and (3) enabling capacities creating decisionmaking structures and processes to identify and address root causes of risks and enact integrated practical solutions. To these ends, promoting sustainable infrastructure, actionable information, and effective institutions are the interlocking building blocks of resilient water systems.

Infrastructure

Sustainable infrastructure constitutes the backbone of resilient water systems. Pumping stations, storage facilities, treatment plants, distribution and drainage networks provide absorptive and adaptive capacities to meet the stresses of growing demands and mitigate and rebound from the impacts of extreme events. Yet across Sub-Saharan Africa, inadequate resources and deficient management often undermine effective infrastructure development. Much infrastructure development struggles under a costly and wasteful cycle of build, neglect, rebuild. Around the region, for example, the installation of handpumps has expanded the physical infrastructure for increasing water access. But country analyses suggest that sub-standard construction quality and lack of maintenance contribute to render one-quarter of handpumps in Sub-Saharan Africa inoperative at any given time. Up to 40 percent of new rural water points in some states fail within two years. Similarly, an alarming proportion of the region’s water supplies disappears into leaking pipes, defective metering, and theft. Known as “non-revenue water” (NRW), these losses represent water supplies produced by utilities or service providers but lost or unaccounted for in the distribution system. For a dozen Sub-Saharan African countries reporting data for 2023, NRW averaged 30–60 percent, with some providers recording losses above 90 percent.

By the same token, infrastructure operations must increasingly account for worsening climatic extremes. Such hazards can significantly degrade water systems and resources. Droughts dry up surface and groundwater sources and concentrate contaminants in diminishing water supplies. Floods can destroy or damage infrastructure, overflow drainage and sewage systems, and wash sediments and pollutants from land surfaces into water bodies. Crucially, infrastructure established to mitigate one risk can have unintended consequences on the risks of the opposite hazard. Dikes built to control flooding, for instance, can reduce replenishment of underground aquifers, diminish groundwater levels, and exacerbate drought impacts.

To ensure water security, infrastructure development must plan beyond initial construction to implement models for sustainable funding, operations, monitoring, and maintenance for reliable service delivery over the system’s lifetime. Likewise, infrastructure design and performance must look beyond physical implementation and coverage of individual facilities and operations to focus on systemic resilience across water supply, sanitation, and disaster risk reduction. So-called nature-based solutions, among other approaches, can reduce pressures for new construction and achieve substantial returns on investment by capitalizing on existing natural infrastructure. Strategies such as managed aquifer recharge, for example—sometimes called “groundwater banking”—can collect excess surface waters such as storm and floodwater flows to strategically replenish underground aquifers for later use.

Information

Managing complex water security risks depends on accurate, timely, and consistent information to guide policymaking, implementation, and evaluation. Much of Sub-Saharan Africa, though, suffers from a comparative paucity of detailed and accessible water data. Observation networks for recording hydrological data are often thin. Policies and systems for data collection, availability, analysis, and application are often weak. Advances in multiple technologies, such as satellite remote sensing, offer significant new opportunities to enhance systematic data collection and fill gaps in areas with sparse in-situ monitoring capacities. Innovations in AI and machine learning likewise increasingly can empower water managers to integrate multiple data sources, formulate predictive models to support decisionmaking, and inform early warning systems for water security risks.

Effective water management requires apprehending contextual socio-economic dynamics as well as hydrological indicators. Across Africa, for instance, rural households widely make use of multiple water sources for different purposes, reflecting the diversity of water needs they have and the water insecurity risks they face. A community might rely on fee-for-service municipal delivery during the dry season but turn to free collection from a surface water source during the rainy season. Understanding these practices can inform utilities and suppliers to develop service models to more sustainably and reliably provision different users under differing conditions. A growing body of Household Water Insecurity Experience Scales studies now surveys users around the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa, on water access and availability for their regular needs. Have they experienced water interruptions, have they lacked water to wash, to prepare food, to drink, or lacked water altogether? Developing robust, standardized metrics and geo-located tracking can help water managers better frame policies addressing the multiple facets of water security and strengthening societies’ absorptive and adaptive resilience capacities.

African policymakers recognize a lack of adequate data as a significant obstacle to achieving their water security goals. Improving and ensuring the collection and application of such information streams will demand increased capacity building in national water and weather services, strengthened collaboration among data providers and end-users, and defined responsibilities and policies for data access and availability. The Africa Multi-Hazard Early Warning and Early Action System, recently launched by the African Union to bolster and coordinate member states, regional, and continental early warning, represents one such initiative.

Institutions

Building and sustaining resilient water systems necessitates managing water risks and resources across multiple scales, stakeholders, types of water use, and levels of governance. Operationalizing resilience requires policymakers to consider multiple parameters: resilience of what system or systems; resilience to what risk or risks; resilience for whom, where, when (for what timeframe); and resilience by what means? Institutions represent the fora in which these questions are determined, embodying the enabling structures, rules, and resources through which people organize and negotiate to achieve particular purposes around water.

Sub-Saharan Africa exhibits a diversity of governance structures, but most water systems are managed by a mix of government institutions overseeing public utilities, traditional authorities, or community-based management, and private sector actors. Complex institutional structures of multiple organizations, processes, functions, and objectives complicate coherent water management. The spatial scales relevant to managing watersheds, river basins, or groundwater aquifers do not typically correspond to the political boundaries of communes, countries, and departments. Roles and responsibilities can be overlapping, unclear, or contested, contributing to siloed or clashing policies and perspectives.

Extensive surveys of water interventions across Africa find a lack of coordination frequently impeding absorptive, adaptive, and enabling resilience and generating adverse outcomes. In Ghana, for example, drought and climate stresses simultaneously strain not only household drinking water sources but also the agricultural production on which rural economies depend. Farmers deploy a variety of resilience strategies, including extending and intensifying irrigation. But uncoordinated increases in water withdrawals for crops can then compete with the domestic needs of other users reliant upon the same water sources, compromising resilience and spurring conflicts between households and communities.

Building water security through a resilience lens can be encouraged through establishing regular participatory platforms and processes for gathering water stakeholders across institutions and levels of governance. Deliberate mechanisms such as water user associations, umbrella authorities, and water commissions can promote policy coherence, share knowledge, align priorities, and coordinate information and resource flows to help maximize development effectiveness and impacts. Strengthening governance institutions and capacities provides a key to strengthening water security and resilience. It receives inadequate attention and resources. African decision-makers universally identify institutional weaknesses and fragmentation as primary impediments to achieving water security. Yet less than 16 percent of all global development assistance for water supply and sanitation in Sub-Saharan Africa for 2002–2021 was directed to water sector policy, governance, and institutional capacity building. Fewer than half the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa have procedures in place in law or practice for users or communities to contribute to policymaking, and only a handful have achieved meaningful levels of participation. This is a recipe for continuing water insecurity. Building a resilient water future demands building the soft infrastructure of institutional capacities as much as the hard infrastructure of pipes and valves.

David Michel is the senior fellow for water security with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.