Water and Sanitation in Africa

Freshwater resources are vital to Africa's livelihoods, food security and power generation ( Marisa Goulden et al., 2009 ). However, with a range of issues such as increasing demand for water, rapidly growing competing uses, climate change, water users together with the governing institutions are responsible to adapt to the new dynamics of freshwater ( Marisa Goulden et al., 2009 ). This blog is written for one of the issues of freshwater in Africa - the transboundary nature of water resources ( UNDP, 2006 ).  Fig.1: Transboundary water resources in East and Southern Africa According to the definition of a transboundary aquifer on the United Nations International Law Commission's Draft Articles on the Law of Transboundary, it is defined as 'an aquifer, parts of which are situated in different countries' ( Article 2c, Stephan 2009 ). It is estimated that 90% of all Africa's water resources are located in river basins that are shared by two or even more countries ( UN...

There is an estimate that there are 600 million people in the world now living in peri-urban homes, which are often ignored by municipal governments due to their inability to provide enough living facilities for the sheer number of people ( Ondieki and Mbegera, 2009 ).  Fig.1: Peri-urban homes in Durban As illustrated by Srivastava et al. (2019) , the current situation is that a majority of the sanitation facilities are provided by the municipalities or the state departments, whereas no roles or responsibilities are left for non-state or informal sectors. However, this distribution of responsibility has caused many problems such as some areas having no sanitation services because they are out of the municipal jurisdiction, the inability of provision of effective sanitation services in densely populated areas, and the neglect of faecal sludge management of wastewater discharge ( Srivastava et al., 2019 ). With sanitation remaining one of the most pressing issues in Africa today, inn...