SUMMARY

Africa is currently the least urbanised region in the world, but this is changing fast. Of the billion people living on the African continent, about 40 per cent lives in urban areas. The urban population in Africa doubled from 205 million in 1990 to 400 million in 2010, and by 2050, it is expected that this would have tripled to 1.23 billion. Of this urban population, 60 per cent is living in slum conditions. In a time of such urban growth, Africa is likely to experience some of the most severe impacts of climate change, particularly when it comes to water and food security. This places huge pressures on the growing urban populations.

Over the last 50 years, many African cities have grown from villages to large agglomerations. To date there are 48 cities with over a million inhabitants in the region. Lagos and Cairo have population figures exceeding 10 million.

The primary driver of the continent’s urbanisation is economic activity, for example, oil in countries such as Angola, Gabon, Libya, Cameroon, Algeria and Nigeria; minerals in Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia; or small industries and agro-business in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. In Mauritania drought conditions provided the driver of urban growth, while it was civil war in the 1980s in Mozambique that resulted in the country’s rural people seeking safety in the urban areas.

The high rate of urbanisation in Africa has not been matched with improvement in service delivery, resulting in inadequate access to safe drinking water and sanitation. The urban population without sanitation services in Africa doubled from 88 million in 1990 to 175 million in 2008. This trend is repeated for the provision of safe drinking water, with the number of people without access doubling from 29 million in 1990 to 57 million in 2008. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is even more restricted in the densely populated slums and peri-urban areas of Africa.

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The delivery of water and sanitation in Africa’s urban centres is characterised by deficient, aging and overloaded networks. This, combined with the degradation of the quantity and quality of water sources through poor management of wastewater and solid waste, as well as low capacity to reuse and recycle wastewater, has resulted in inadequate water supply to serve a growing population.

As towns and cities rapidly increase in size, impoverished people tend to settle along drainages, where they can grow home gardens, while at the same time become exposed to flood risks. Moreover, with rising urbanisation and slums, particularly in towns and smaller cities with limited access to electricity, local forested watersheds are cut for firewood and housing materials, and vegetation is cleared for home gardens and crops. Hence, the water supply and cleaning function of the forested areas is lost, further aggravating the urban water gap.

The loss of ecosystem services, such as the natural filtering of rainwater in forests and riparian zones, brings with it a critical reduction in water quality and increases health risks as available water resources become polluted. The impervious un- vegetated ground of slum areas has little or no retention during heavy rains meaning human and animal wastes are flushed