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CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
Challenges to the supply of clean water and adequate sanitation
in urban areas include:
• Inadequate knowledge and contested data about availablewater
resources, often resulting from weak systems for monitoring,
quality control and absence of data sharing mechanisms;
• Degradation of vital ecosystems such as watersheds,
wetlands, lakes and rivers;
• Inadequate mechanisms for inter- and intra-sectoral planning;
• Weak legislative and institutional arrangements to support
private sector participation;
• Limited and unmonitored access to alternative sources of
water such as groundwater and rainwater harvesting;
• Inadequate facilities for wastewater treatment, discharge and
reuse; and
• Impact of climate change on urban water resources.
Despite the challenges, urbanisation provides an ideal
framework for community engagement in finding long-term
solutions to the provision of clean water and sanitation. In
this regard urban areas represent an organised institutional
structure to not only supply water and sanitation services,
and to provide incentives and penalties in water use, but
to also mainstream the environment through water sector
management reforms such as integrated water resources
management, water demand management and payments
for ecosystem services. These reforms seek to reinforce the
mutual and symbiotic relationship in the urbanisation – water
– ecosystems nexus.
With their large populations, urban areas have the opportunity
to not only work with each other and tap into surrounding
ecosystems through intra-basin water transfer schemes, but
to also generate electricity from waste and wastewater, and to
feed this into regional electric power inter-connections. This
can facilitate the processes of regional integration in the same
way as economic corridors.
OPTIONS FOR POLICY
The improvement of access to safe drinking water and
sanitation for urban areas in the long-term requires a holistic
approach, which among other things is conscious of the
connection between urbanisation, water and ecosystems. This
requires policy interventions, including some options that:
• Prioritise water availability for basic needs of people
and ecosystem services through policy and local level
interventions that stimulate resource-conserving land use
practices and improve water productivity for long term
ecosystem sustainability;
• Recognise water as a human right, by ensuring that the right
to water is guaranteed on the basis of non-discrimination,
and that third parties, including the private sector, are
prevented from interfering with this right;
• Acknowledge and support the role of small- and large-scale
private sector activities in complementing government and
Figure 11:
The number of people in Africa with access to
improved sanitation, defined as “one that hygienically separates
human excreta from human contact” (WHO/UNICEF 2010),
has increased over the last two decades. Still, because of the
rapid urbanisation, the proportion of the urban population with
access to improved sanitation is on the decrease.
Urban population
Population with access
to improved sanitation
1990
1995
2000
2005
2008
Access to sanitation in urban Africa
Million people
Source: WHO-UNICEF,
A Snapshot of Drinking Water and Sanitation in Africa
, 2010.
100
0
200
300
400
500