State of Africa’s Environment: Water poverty grips the youngest urban continent

Cities across Africa are enduring familiar experiences: rapid urbanisation, more water demand but less availability and inadequate infrastructure to deliver services. Water scarcity in urban Africa is an emerging challenge, found the annual State of Africa’s Environment 2024 report published by the Delhi-based think tank Centre for Science and Environment and the Down To Earth magazine.

Africa is the youngest urban continent. In a breathtaking change over, from an overwhelming rural landscape, it has become the fastest urbanising continent. The African Development Bank termed the urbanisation “the most profound transformations that the African continent will undergo in the 21st century.”

In the 1960s, Africa was 80 per cent rural. Currently, 50 per cent of the continent is urban. In 1990-2020, the number of cities in Africa leaped from 3,300 to 7,600. Expectedly, urban population also increased by 500 million during this period.

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which implements humanitarian and development projects of the multilateral body, ssaid that by 2050, more than 1.3 billion people in Africa will be living in urban areas. About 57 per cent of the population currently lives in rural areas, but the proportion of the population living in urban areas is projected to exceed 60 per cent by 2050.

Download the State of Africa’s Environment 2024 report free here.

According to the World Resources Institute (WRI)’s report Upward and Outward Growth: Managing Urban Expansion for More Equitable Cities in the Global South, “recent United Nations (UN) forecasts indicate that between 2010 and 2050 the urban population in developing countries is likely to almost double from 3.6 billion to 6.7 billion.

About one-third of this growth will occur in just three countries: Nigeria, India, and China, with Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent expected to absorb the majority of overall growth.”

This unprecedented migration of people to urban areas also means the water woes that haunt the rural population will grip the urban settlements. All indicators point towards this.

First, the demand for water is going to increase like never before. According to the World Bank estimates, “The increase in water demand in Africa between 2005 and 2030 is projected to be 283 per cent—three times higher than almost any other region. A significant portion of this new demand (an estimated 92 billion cubic meters or 20 per cent) will come from the municipal and domestic sectors, and competition with other water-using sectors, most notably agriculture (which accounts for 72 per cent of this increase), will increase dramatically.”

Secondly, as in the rural areas, the number of urban people facing water scarcity in urban Africa will increase by around 285 per cent.

At least 24 large cities in 15 African nations are likely to be water-scarce in 2050, finds a world-wide estimation of the urban population facing water scarcity led by scientists from the Beijing Normal University, Shanghai Normal University and Deakin University, Australia which was published in the journal Nature in August 2021. Urbanisation and climate change together are projected to be key drivers of the water scarcity in African cities, said the study.

At the global scale, the urban population facing water scarcity was projected to increase rapidly, reaching 2.065 billion people by 2050, a 121.3 per cent increase from 2016. But, in Africa, the number of urban people facing water scarcity will increase by 284.7 per cent. This is the highest increase amongst all regions — Asia, North America, South America, Europe and Oceania.

Of the 10 countries projected to have the highest number of urban residents facing water scarcity, Nigeria and Egypt are two prominent ones. Nigeria is expected to witness a 277 per cent increase in water scarce urban residents and Egypt could report an unprecedented 3,155 per cent increase.

The fast-urbanising Africa grapples with unequal distribution and access to water. The COVID-19 pandemic brought out the scale and severity of this aspect of urban water governance on the continent. “COVID-19 has acted as a magnifying glass on pressing water challenges, stressing and widening, amongst others, existing inequalities in access to water and sanitation services,” noted the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“Many cities and urban areas in Africa struggle to ensure an adequate water supply for current residents. And large differences exist between countries,” according to UNOPS.

The WRI termed access to water a matter of urgency across Africa, particularly “where the number of water-insecure urban residents is rising — even when dams are full and aquifers are replenished by the wet season. Nearly 63 per cent of urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to basic water and sanitation.”

A 2019 WRI analysis of five cities in Sub-Saharan Africa illustrated that less than 25 per cent of the urban population had access to safely managed water, while only 42 per cent had access to safely managed sanitation services. “The service gap between the provision of water and the growing urban population is widening,” the WRI analysis warned.

Declining water quality is adding to the urban water crisis in Africa. A recent study by Edward R Jones, Marc FP Bierkens and Michelle TH van Vliet of the department of physical geography, faculty of geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands, on the impact of water quality on overall water scarcity said, “Water quantity and quality are interrelated. Water scarcity increases the concentration of pollutants, while water pollution reduces the availability of clean water.”

The study titled Current and future global water scarcity intensifies when accounting for surface water quality was published in Nature in May, 2024. It evaluated “clean water scarcity”, or level of access to clean water.

Some 3.8 billion people, or 55 per cent of the global population, are currently exposed to clean water scarcity at least one month per year, the study found. Of this, 1.1 billion people, or 16 per cent of the world’s population, are exposed to clean water scarcity for more than nine months per year.

In comparison, 3.3 billion, or 47 per cent of the world’s population, suffers from water scarcity, where water demand is greater than water availability (excludes water quality). Further, the exposure to clean water scarcity for at least one month per year will increase to 56–66 per cent by the end of the century, according to the study.

Clean water scarcity will hit the developing countries the most in the future, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, driven by a combination of water quantity and quality aspects.

“Strong reductions in both anthropogenic water use and pollution are therefore necessary to minimise the impact of future clean water scarcity on humans and the environment, says one of the most comprehensive scientific global assessments on water scarcity,” claimed the lead researchers from Utrecht University. 

Poor urban water security is also threatening the achievement of UN-mandated Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 (clean water and sanitation) and SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities). Going forward, the cities need to focus on strategies for promoting water-sensitive urban planning and governance.

(This article is excerpted from the State of Africa’s Environment 2024 report. To read the full article, download the report free here)