Water and Food in Africa

To conclude this series of blog posts about Water and Food in Africa, we have explored various challenges and opportunities in the water and agriculture sectors through case studies illustrating the issues at hand, often with geographically sensitive factors that make them unique and not universally applicable in coming up with sweeping, continent wide solutions for the entirety of Africa.  The challenges of sustainable agriculture and the role of market forces were explored through the case study of Kenya’s cut-flower industry, raising key questions about how best to balance economic development goals and sustainable ecological practice, with the former often taking precedence. The roles of public and private institutions in achieving sustainable water and food provision were then examined through the work of the Uchira Water User Association in Tanzania, showing the complexities of taking a grassroots, community-driven approach to public water infrastructure provision, which also...

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...