African youth have an important role to play in overcoming water problems and enhancing the continent’s economies. This chapter provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities in the water sector in Africa as well as some ideas to inspire African youth to engage more in it; whether through involvement in agriculture, water availability, enhancing water quality, involvement in the blue economy, or working on transboundary water resources.
4.2 Water availability
Water availability is crucial to sustaining life and furthering development. One-fifth of Africa consists of arid and semi-arid land where water availability is a pressing challenge (World Water Assessment Programme [WWAP]/United Nations Water [UNW] 2018). Rainfall in these regions is erratic and much of the available water should be utilized in a sustainable manner. Availability of
Water scarcity in Cape Town, South Africa
In April 2018, after three years of extreme drought, the City of Cape Town faced a dire prospect: it would be the first major city in the world to run out of water. There are various causes for the Cape Town water crisis, but the main cause is climate change (World Weather Attribution 2018). Undoubtedly, factors such as poor governance and over-consumption were influential. Cape Town's award-winning Water Conservation and Demand Management Programme (C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group n.d.) has nevertheless managed to level-out consumption since 2000, even as its population has grown dramatically (Groundup 2018). Drought is not uncommon in Southern Africa or even Cape Town, but the winter rains have always brought reprieve. However, following two successive dry winters, 2017 brought no relief and proved to be one of the driest years in recent decades - a once-in- a-millennium event, which arguably exonerates “the Cape’s government, as well as water engineers designing Cape Town’s water supply system from blame for the current water crisis” (Wolski 2017). As a result, Cape Town’s residents were forced to more than halve their water usage from 1,200 million litres per day in 2015, to just over 500 million litres per day in 2018, restricting individuals to 50 litres a day - less than a third of the global average (Cotterill 2018).
As expected, the local economy felt the effects of these water restrictions, too. Enterprises were at risk of closing down, because of restrictions and the fact that they were unable to offer safe water and sanitation to employees. Although the full extent of the economic impact is still unknown, it is evident that tourism, and even more so, agriculture, bore and will continue to bear the brunt of the impacts. With regards to agriculture, a sector on which the City of Cape Town’s province, Western Cape, is heavily reliant, 2018 had the lowest harvest in decades, “which will cause projected losses of ZAR1 billion [US$70 million] to the sector and deprive 50,000 seasonal workers of their jobs” (Zille 2018). Addressing the risk of recurrence has been brought to the fore. In addition, in a city plagued by severe inequality, sluggish economic growth, and high unemployment, especially amongst the youth, “the level of risk that already exists is being heightened in an unprecedented way by climate change” (Espinosa and Mizutori 2018).
Nowadays, the priority for Cape Town is putting measures in place that safeguard it against what the former Executive Mayor referred to as “the new normal” (de Lille 2017), whilst simultaneously addressing the socio-economic issues that continue to characterise the city it governs. Though this is a demanding and complex task, there is promise in committing to and investing in such actions, especially long-term policies and strategies of climate adaptation strategies, which could foster new innovations and bring about new job opportunities – especially for the youth, for whom the unemployment rate sits at almost 40 per cent (South Africa, Department of Statistics 2018). Global cities that have experienced similar water crises are often criticised for failing to foster public-private agreements and establish robust partnerships (Böhm and Flores 2015). As such, the City of Cape Town would do well to work with the private sector in providing the regulatory frameworks for innovation to occur. Although dam levels have improved, the City of Cape Town’s water supplies still remain precarious due to the uncertainty of rainfall patterns, and alternative sources of water are recommended, such as permanent desalination plants, treated effluent stations, and water re-use facilities. All of this requires not just manual labour in construction, but also training and capacity-building for knowledge transfer – preparing the next generation of engineers to adapt and build according to ‘the new normal’.
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Our Water, Our Life Force
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