Africa faces many challenges including water infrastructure: AfDB expert

Residents walk past polluted water and piles of garbage at Kibera slum in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, Sept. 3, 2010. According to UNESCO, an estimate of 884 million people, most in Africa, do not have access to safe drinking water, while some 1.5 million children under five died each year from sickness caused by water-borne diseases. UN data projected that achieving the Millennium Development Goals for access to safe water and sanitation would produce a global saving of more than 84 billion U.S. dollars. (Xinhua/Zhao Yingquan)

In Sub-Sahara Africa in general, there is no water shortage, but there is a lack of storage capacity and distribution systems, said Wael Soliman, water expert from Tunisia-based African Development Bank (AfDB) in an exclusive interview with Xinhua at the ongoing World Water Week in Stockholm on Wednesday.

"And we end up with shortage in the drinking water. Drinking water is very limited. We will have to carry water for a long distance from a safer source. But when it comes to agriculture, the main problem is the lack of infrastructure to store the water during the flood season and use it during the dry season,"Soliman said.

On the other hand, there is also a lack of the facility to drain the excessive water in the agricultural land because sometimes there is more rainfall than one can handle. So there is a need to introduce agricultural drainage during the flood season and irrigation during the dry season. Therefore, Africa needs to build more reservoirs and dams for multi-purposes.

"We have to build it for irrigation, for hydropower, for fisheries, for recreation, so it is efficient to the society and we have also to study properly the environmental and social impact and provide proper compensation to all those communities and the environment that are affected," Soliman said.

On the water quality issue, Soliman said that the self purification capacity in African water bodies is still capable of handling current load of waste that is reaching the water courses. But urban areas are at the brink of pollution due to human and animal waste, untreated sewage and limited industrial sewage.

Soliman suggested that preventive actions must be taken now.


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