Africa Water Week, 22-26 November 2010: Will Good Things Spring Forth?

Now that my 'scraping' episode has dissipated I can get on to more substantive issues. Like... 

It's the third Africa Water Week, this year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. 

So what is the theme? Try: Implementing the Africa Water Vision and the MDG Target: Challenges and Opportunities in Water and Sanitation. Impressive!

Here's the blurb:

The African Ministers’ Council on Water (AMCOW), in keeping with its decision to institutionalize the annual Africa Water Week (AWW), is pleased to announce that the 3rd Africa Water Week (AWW3) will be held at the United Nations Conference Centre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 22 to 26 of November 2010.

With only five years away from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target date of 2015, the 3rd Africa Water Week will provide a unique occasion for taking a comprehensive stock of the challenges faced and progresses made across the continent towards achieving the goals and targets set on water and sanitation. Building on the momentum of the last Africa Water Week, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, the next Water Week will also be an opportunity to pin point and prioritize with precision the areas where Africa needs to do more and better than before in order to ensure that equitable access to water and sanitation makes a critical contribution in Africa’s progress towards sustainable development.

The African Water Week represents a political commitment at the highest level where governments, regional institutions, international partners, the private sector, the scientific community, civil society, and the media from all over the world, and in particular Africa, meet to discuss and collectively seek solutions to Africa’s water and sanitation challenges.  Accordingly, the event aims to focus attention on accelerating implementation of the actions envisaged in internationally and regionally agreed goals and targets in the areas of water and sanitation.

I learned of AWW3 a week or so ago when some of the water initiatives that consume my time sought information from people working in Africa; in one case, the State Department wanted to know.  Since I don't work in Africa I had nothing to report.

Africa seems to be big on everyone's minds these days, and for good reason: water issues seem to loom larger there, whether they be the potential impacts of climate change, WaSH, governance, corruption, or others.

And from the tell-me-something-I-don't-know-department comes this from the African Development Bank (AfDB):

The AfDB will also launch during the 3rd Africa Water week two major reports. The Water Sector Governance in Africa report finds that poor governance has been a major reason for the poor record of sustainability of water and sanitation services affecting millions of Africans.

Maybe 'corruption' too, although I suspect that is subsumed under 'poor governance'.

FYI: the second AfDB report is Guidelines for User Fees and Cost Recovery for Urban and Rural Water and Sanitation.

I suspect all the 'usual suspects' will be there, all anxious to feed at the trough of development. But I sure hope AWW3 has speakers like Tushaar Shah, whom I heard speak last June. He may not tell them what they want to hear about development. I summarized what he said on 15 June 2010 at the Toward Sustainable Groundwater in Agriculture conference:

Tushaar Shah, author of Taming the Anarchy, gave a fascinating talk about the comparison between groundwater use for irrigation in South Asia (SA; India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). He speculated that groundwater could do for SSA what it did for SA in terms of eliminating famines. He emphasized that because of economies of scale that are not present in SSA it would be better to focus on groundwater use by smallholder agriculture, which would not be a threat to the groundwater resource and catalyze the region to develop its economies. He indicated that decades of focusing on large-scale surface water irrigation projects have not done much for SSA: only 5% of its cropped land is irrigated, versus 55% in SA.

Shah suggested that treadle/manual irrigation pumps should be forsaken in favor of small, cheap, electric pumps, following the lead of Bangladesh. He would empower women by using APIM - Assisted Pump Irrigation Markets, by which 6-8 young women in  a villlage would be trained to function as community Irrigation Service Providers (ISPs). He posited that 3-5 million ISPs could be established in SSA for about $1B - $1.5 B USD, a literal drop in the bucket.

Shah noted that this would require a thorough assessment of SSA's groundwater resources and the development of an agrarian business model.

His presentation evoked a question from Dr. Stephen Foster, former head of hydrogeology at the British Geological Survey and now at the World Bank, who wondered whether the hydrogeology of SSA was adequate for this approach. Interesting that Foster did not mention a BGS program that might help realize Shah's vision. I wondered whether the electricity infrastructure was available to use electric pumps. But Shah's idea is novel and deserves more attention.  Lord knows we haven't succeeded in helping SSA avoid famines.

Shah made an interesting comment: groundwater, not democracy,  has freed India and Pakistan from famines (apologies to Amartya Sen).  

Should be an interesting time in Ethiopia, and I hope some good things spring forth. Africa could use some good things.

"Don't insult the crocodile until you've crossed the river." -- Sudanese proverb

Comments

[David Zetland]

As long as SSA doesn't make the HUGE mistake of subsidizing capital or electricity costs. Better yet, have NO government programs and remove current barriers to water use and food marketing. So many problems can be traced back to corruption and elite capture of the State.