Meeting Africa's Food and Water Needs- Whose Job is it?

  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 water infrastructure, ranging from short term management contracts, to decades long concession and divestiture. The argument for this has been to increase the efficiency of water resource allocation and improve the financial sustainability of managing water infrastructure through increasing the marginal cost recovery (the price of water and operation of the infrastructure).

Figure 1- The 'cycle of water poverty' due to low investment and cost recovery

Source: The Sustainable Sanitation and

Water Management Toolbox

However, there have been significant issues posed by a shift from public to private funding of water infrastructure, such as investor reluctance due to the high initial capital costs of building infrastructure, as well as the high degree of risk involved in recovering those costs through billing. This can create a positive feedback loop of ‘water poverty’, as shown in Figure 1, where lack of investment results in poor levels of service and income, further reducing investment incentives. In addition, pushes to reduce subsidies and increase marginal cost recovery are often resulting in poorer households paying more for a worse service than wealthier ones. This means that there is a need for a strong ‘social incentive’ to be given to companies to subsidise poorer water users using rising block tariffs, which should arguably be carried out by national governments in the interest of the public.

Issues surrounding the role of government also apply to community-based management of water infrastructure. For example, whilst the Uchira Water User Association (UWUA) found some success in financing equitable development of water infrastructure through water tariffs (Cleaver, 2006), the overall financial sustainability of the management scheme required funding from the national government. Therefore, the roles of different institutions are highly dependent on the unique socio-economic and political circumstances of individual African countries (Hutchings, 2015).

Figure 2- Increasing resource stress in India due to virtual water exports

Source: Drishtikone

Implications for Food Security

Understanding the role of institutional governance of water infrastructure is also essential for effective food security policies. Managing the national and international trade of virtual water of a country is important in making sure localised water infrastructure is sustainably managed in conjunction with other entities. For example, 41% of cereals produced and traded between Indian states were found to come from areas with over-exploited groundwater resources (Harris et al 2020), arguably making a case for the government to intervene through national level integrated water resource management strategies. In addition, Figure 2 shows increasing international trade exports of virtual water from India, stressing water resources at the national level.

Water infrastructure management is a complex issue that I cannot claim to understand on more than an individual case-by-case basis; however, hopefully this post has highlighted some of the issues facing integrated water and food security management. In my next post, I hope to show some innovative water management strategies and possibly expand on my research interests in virtual water!