Water and Food in Africa: 2022

Since the last post discussed some of the ineffectiveness of the community management projects, this post will focus on private sector participation and provide some of my own understandings of a good combination of institutions for sub-Saharan African(SSA) countries. The phrase privatisation refers to various contractual agreements between the government and the private sector, from a management contract through divestiture. The emphasis of development policy has moved from the state to the private sector during the last two decades.  In most sections of the SSA, privatisation is now at the core of utility reform. Figure 1: Water supply and sanitation improved in seven sub-Saharan countries between 1990 and 2008. Source: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (2010) Decentralisation-induced improvements have resulted in an overall improvement in water delivery. The good effect is shown in the high number of upgraded water sources, which supply communities with a broader sele...

Community water management has been a widely accepted strategy in primarily low-income countries suffering from water insecurity problems. It seems to be a straightforward solution: every community is responsible for its own water resources. Is that really the case? In Sub-Saharan Africa(SSA) Countries, community development and sustainability have become very important due to the inefficiency of top-down approaches and government supports. Involving the locals in all stages of a project is therefore considered essential for well-functioning community management in the long run. Involving the locals in the selection of appropriate technologies, sites and service levels, and encouraging them to pay for part of the investment, operation and maintenance costs, is essential to gaining community support. In some cases, the locals may find this cheap water supply beneficial and would like to participate. In other cases, local users may expect the services to be free since they may think it ...

 COP27 was held and finished several weeks ago 'successfully'. COP27's primary focus is on climate justice. This means that developing countries, which account for the most negligible historical carbon emission, have unfairly suffered more from the global climate crisis. However, many scholars and critics have seen this conference as a 'failure' for many reasons. I agree with the critics and argue that Africa needs more practical help from COP27, which it failed to accomplish this time.                                                                     Figure 1: a picture of  COP27. ( Source ) As the window of opportunity to meet our goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C or lower rapidly closes , COP 27 does too little on the most critical mitigation issue of all - reducing emissions. Climate just...