Introduction

 

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 the year. In areas of East Africa, there has already been measurable reductions in overall annual rainfall due to warming temperatures in the Indian Ocean, thus reducing agricultural productivity further (Funk, 2009). Climate modelling work has indicated the potential for a reduction in maize (the primary cereal crop in sub-saharan Africa) yields of up to 12% by the 2050’s (Tesfaye et al. 2015). Therefore, there are several issues facing many African nations in meeting the 2030 Millenium Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's) to provide clean water (SDG 6) and eradicate hunger (SDG 2), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 2: The Water-Energy-Food Nexus, showing the interlinkages between the three sectors

Source: The Global Water Partnership

However, it is important to understand that there are unique opportunities for sustainable water and food provision, such as through effective management of African groundwater aquifer supplies (Gaye, 2018). Future blog posts will be taking an in-depth look at specific case studies where groundwater is being managed effectively and ineffectively, exploring potential political, economic and social factors influencing national governance strategies. This will include discussion of how accurate monitoring is needed to understand the availability of groundwater and how best to manage it. Future blog posts will also try to draw on links with other important elements of water resource management in Africa, taking an integrated approach to understanding water, using frameworks such as the Water-Energy-Food nexus., As shown in Figure 2, the WEF nexus acknowledges key interlinkages between sectors, which are often treated as entirely separate entities in national governments, resulting in potential conflicts of interest between sectors and positive outcomes from one having unintended negative outcomes on another (Daher, 2015).

I hope that as I further my understanding of water and food in Africa, I will be able to illustrate different development perspectives and responses to issues of water and food scarcity at the regional scale, to show how highly variable biophysical and social factors shape various adaptive strategies to climate-change induced agricultural decline (Fagbemi, 2023).