Water and Politics in Africa

Having looked at surface water contamination in Ghana last week, this week I will be investigating management of water supplies following conflict, addressing Côte d'Ivoire’s successful water privatisation, and comparing this to the pitfalls of water management in Sierra Leone.     Both Côte d'Ivoire and Sierra Leone share similar stories, having gained independence in the early 1960s and having since been marred by conflict, with  Côte d'Ivoire's  armed rebellion in 2002 splitting the nation in two ( HRW, 2011 ), and Sierra Leone’s  1991 to 2002  Civil War claiming some 70,000 casualties and displaced 2.6 million people ( UNDP ).  UN Troops in  Côte d'Ivoire . Source .  This persistent unrest has had numerous adverse implications on sanitation and water quality, with mass-urbanisation following the conflict placing a strain on sewage and sanitation facilities in urban areas, heightening the risk of water-borne diseases such as Guinea worm ( MAP International ). In

Following on from last week's wider-scale introduction to the politics of water and development in West Africa, this week's blog will centre specifically around Ghana's water resources and the challenges faced by contamination, a key component of inadequate water supply  ( Adela na et al, 2008 , Fayiga et al, 2017 ), observed here as chiefly  arising  due to insufficient governance.    In terms of surface water resources, Ghana is well endowed, with Lake Volta being the largest artificial reservoir in the world based on surface area  ( Gansah et al, 2016 ). The nation’s geology however, dominated by crystalline rocks, means groundwater flow is heavily restricted to joints and fractures within crystalline rock formations ( BGS ), resulting in surface water being the central source of drinking-water for  five million people  in the Northern regions  ( Mintz et al., 2001 ).  The Volta River System.  Solomon et al, 2020 .  Moreover, as posited by  Buckley & Achilles, 2016 ,

My name is Sebastian Alsina-Olaizola and over the course of several weeks, I will explore the nature of politics and water in Africa, focussing in particular on West Africa, which consists of 16 unique nations and 400 million people.  I have opted to look at the political aspects of water, specifically, "water conflict", defined as, “Any disagreement or dispute over or about water, where external social, economic, legal, political or military intervention is needed to resolve the problem” ( Ashton, 2007 ), having recently returned from a year abroad in California. Here, I gained a brief insight into the politicised nature of water, even on a continent that holds the largest share of the world’s total freshwater ( Gaye and Tindimugaya, 2019 ). I was able to kayak down the Colorado River, and learnt of the historic disagreements over the Compact Agreement which distributes use between the seven states the river runs through, as well as damming by the US, that has led to the riv