Conclusion – Wrapping up the water issue

Fig.1: Africa´s water issue is complex (Caelus Green Room)

Let´s wrap it all up! In the past weeks I have looked at water and food in Africa from many different angles. We got to know examples from all over the continent, investigated different geographical scales: local, national and international.

To me the key conclusion is that the water issue in Africa is extremely heterogenous! There is not THE solution for THE water crisis. Africa is a continent accommodating not only many different climate zones, geological conditions and vegetation, it is also home of many different peoples, political systems, languages, customs and traditions, rural and urban, that all affect the way water can be withdrawn, accessed and used. There is no single agricultural technology to achieve food security in Africa, but rather water issues have to be tackled with using a huge variety of approaches specific to each particular context.

There are extremely dry countries like Egypt, where almost 100% of the population have safe access to drinking water, but there are also countries like Zambia, Malawi or Ghana, where water is abundant, but still large parts of the population suffer from water shortages. To understand the paradoxes surrounding water in Africa a few statements can be made:

freshwater in Africa is unevenly distributed geographically and temporally
it is not necessarily the physical presence of water that determines water access, but socio-economic circumstances
it is not either small-scale or large-scale approaches that are the most effective, but the scale has to be adequate for its context
multi-sector approaches involving a plurality of actors like government, local communities, farmers, engineers, NGOs etc. are more likely to succeed
it is all about RESILIENCE, so the ability to cope with water shortages or water surplus in the short and long term

When I´ve started this blog I didn´t know anything about water, but what the media and politics have conveyed to me. The more I looked into the topic, the more ambivalent and diverse the issue got. I am aware of the fact that with such a spatial distance to the target regions and my little snippets of knowledge that I tried to expand over the last weeks, I am not able to fully grasp water in Africa in all its complexity, and it would be presumptuous to assume otherwise. But, I hope by looking at water through different lenses I helped you and certainly myself to get a better understand of the challenges and possibilities of water development in Africa.

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Through the lens - A perspective on water and food in Africa

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