Water and Food in Africa

Context: Climate change is one of the most important factors (and threats) to water and food security in the future, with some of its impacts already being felt across the globe. This is due to climate change increasing the inter-annual variability of rainfall, with less frequent but more intense rainfall events happening throughout the year. In addition, there is also less overall rainfall overland. As a result, climate change has serious implications to water and food provision, particularly in many African countries who ‘disproportionately face impacts of climate change’ ( Williams et al, 2022 ), due to climatic and climatic and socio-economic factors reducing many populations’ adaptive capacity against climate change. With ‘85% of Africa’s poor’ largely depending on rural agriculture coinciding with ‘[increased] vulnerability of the agriculture sector’ ( Trisos et al, 2022 ) due to climate change associated droughts, adaptive strategies are essential to meeting Africa’s food and w...

  Introduction: Picking up from my previous blog post about the role of institutions in sustainable water and food resource management, this post will explore some of the key interactions between WASH (water and sanitation hygiene) and food security, as well as the importance of an integrated strategy of improving WASH as part of food security in Africa. Linking Food and water security with sanitation: Figure 1- Changes in sanitation access in Sub-saharan Africa Source: ( Armah, et al, 2018 ) There is a key causal link between WASH and food security, as malnutrition is directly caused by not only lack of food, but also by the spread of disease due to lack of sanitation (WHO, 2015) , or drinking faecally-contaminated water, for example. As a result, it is vital to understand that improvements to food security must include an integrated strategy of improving widespread access to sanitation. This is particularly relevant to many of the rapidly expanding urban areas in Africa with poo...

    Context There are massively large-scale water and food security issues facing a great proportion of African countries, with 387 million people in Sub-Sahran Africa without access to drinking water in 2015, with Sub-Sahran Africa ‘making the slowest relative and aggregate global  progress’ ( Hope, 2015 ). In addition, 37% of the African continent is facing food insecurity in 2020 (up from 25% in 2000) ( Mumuni, 2020 ). However, much academic debate has revolved around which combination of institutions should take on the task of meeting these needs, with various countries shifting between public, private, community-lead and public-private partnership models of development of water and food infrastructure.  Public Infrastructure Development and Issues of Governance: Whilst provision of clean drinking water can be seen as a public service that the government should provide, there has been ‘great pressure ’ for many African nations to increasingly privatise their wa...

 As outlined in my introductory post last week, water is a critical resource that is needed to facilitate agricultural production. However, there are significant environmental challenges facing African nations (and the rest of the world) in sustainably meeting its food and water needs, with 4 billion people globally facing severe water scarcity for at least a month each year ( Mekonnen, 2016 ).  As many countries see rapid urbanisation and a resulting increased, concentrated demand for food supplies, intensive irrigated agriculture is often seen as a necessary alternative to small-scale subsistence farming. This post will explore the environmental challenges and opportunities in sustainable agriculture through the lens of Dr. Mesfin Mekonnen's work on sustainable agriculture in Kenya. Figure 1: Irrigated farmland in Nigeria showing intensification of agriculture Source: The Business Post With access to only 9% of global freshwater resources (Gaye, 2018) , Africa, and pa...

  Introduction: Welcome to my blog on Water and Food in Africa! Over the next several weeks, I will be exploring how water, as an essential resource to sustaining human life, is being managed and developed in relation to food provision in Africa. I hope to provide a critical perspective on the various challenges and opportunities in meeting water and food security needs, through the use of specific local and national level case studies. Figure 1: The UN’s Millennium Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) to be achieved globally by 2030 Source: The United Nations Contextualising Water and Food in Africa: Africa as a continent has the lowest proportion of access to safe drinking water and the lowest rates of food production, due to 80-90% of agricultural activity being self-subsistence, rain-fed agriculture. In addition, climate change is increasing the inter-annual variability of rainfall, with fewer but more extreme precipitation events ( Allan et al. 2010 ), throughout th...