AFRICA: Cities face Water Crisis, U.N. Official Warns by Traci Hukill, United Nations Foundation 6:51pm 13th Feb, 2003   Feb. 12, 2003    WASHINGTON - Mushrooming urban populations, exploitative water pricing and filthy rivers have fomented a water crisis in Africa that is poised to become truly catastrophic unless the international community acts now to secure safe water and sanitation for the continent's cities, U.N. Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka told a crowd at a luncheon here yesterday.    About 50 ambassadors, government officials and representatives from nongovernmental organizations gathered at the invitation of the United Nations Foundation to hear Tibaijuka speak. Introduced by United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth as "one of the most charming individuals in the U.N. system," the petite Tibaijuka, a native of Tanzania, took the podium and proceeded to lay out the scope of the water problem facing African cities, a plan for addressing it and a plea for funding to help curb it.    Tibaijuka began by praising last summer's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg for including water and shelter among its priorities. The link between safe water and proper development, she said, is inextricable. "Without safe water and adequate sanitation, there can be no sustainable human settlements," she said. "And without sustainable settlements, there could be no sustainable development."    Settlement patterns in Africa are undergoing a radical change. The most rapidly urbanizing region in the world, Africa is expected to have 500 million people living in its cities by 2020 - up from 138 million in 1990. With the proliferation of slums and informal settlements built haphazardly beyond the terminals of city water and sewer lines, more than half of all urban dwellers lack municipal water supplies. By logical extension, most of those are poor. Exploitative schemes have arisen to fill this vacuum. Tibaijuka noted that the poor pay street vendors five to 20 times what their wealthier neighbors pay for city water.    "It is unbelievable but true that a habitant of Kibera, the largest slum in Nairobi and Africa, earning less than a dollar a day, pays as much as five times the price paid by an average U.S. citizen for a liter of water," said Tibaijuka.    Yet even those who have access to municipal water lines sometimes go without, she said. Taps can run dry for days in the summer. This is due in part to the radically inequitable distribution of water by nature -- Tanzania alone claims 40 percent of Africa's water resources by dint of its proximity to Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, whereas there are 12 African countries that combined have access to only 1 percent of the continent's water - and in part to unfair allocation of what resources do exist. Crumbling infrastructure and lax regulation result in more than half of all water supplies being lost before they reach their intended consumers.    "To give you an example, the volume of water lost as 'unaccounted for' in the capital city of Nairobi because of leakages and illegal connections could meet the water needs of Mombassa, the second-largest city in Kenya," Tibaijuka said. Making matters worse, industry is using more and more water but has few incentives to avoid wasting it.    Finally, Tibaijuka pointed out the need to address often-abhorrent sanitation conditions. "Some of the rivers passing through major cities have degraded into open sewers," she said - a situation that threatens the availability of fresh water for drinking and causes suffering and squalor among the most vulnerable populations.    A plan of attack on this multi-faceted crisis has emerged in the form of the Water for African Cities program, a joint effort between UN-HABITAT, the U.N. Environment Program and eight countries to secure water supplies, ensure pricing is fair and reasonable, bring together the urban development, water and environmental sectors and curb wasteful practices through public education campaigns. Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia are all players in the project, which will export its most successful strategies to cities in other countries.    Tibaijuka ended with an appeal for funding. Various countries have offered or given money to secure water for Africa. The United States pledged to invest $970 million in water projects over the next three years, and Sweden and Norway each donated $2.5 million to the Water for Africa Cities program. But the greater goal of providing water and sanitation to an extra 200 million people in African cities by 2015 will cost much more, Tibaijuka said - some $35 billion.    "Without a solution," Tibaijuka warned toward the end of her speech, "there's going to be a panic around this."    EDITOR'S NOTE: The Better World Fund, a sister organization of the United Nations Foundation, is the sole sponsor of UN Wire, which is published independently by National Journal Group, Inc. Visit the related web page
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