What I have learned about this blog

The past couple of months I have learned a lot about the political dimension of water and development in Africa and in specific in Angola, Botswana, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. I started this blog with a biased view on water and its distribution and amount over the continent. I thought Africa was more than anything, a dry, unfertile continent. A continent plagued by droughts, famine and deserts. How can a country develop and flourish, not only economically but also politically and socially without having any water, was my thought? Of course this view of mine was too simplistic, I knew it was but I did not know the other side of the story. As a Dutch man, living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, with access to great water resources, the struggle for water in Africa seemed far away. My view was influenced by media, addressing Africa as one country, always using its name in the same sentence with aids, poverty, conflict, corruption and definitely water scarcity. Thus, as a child growing up in a Western country my view of Africa was Eurocentric and biased from the beginning, even when I started taking this course.

I was immediately confronted with my biased views in the first lecture that introduced the course. My ideas of distribution, accessibility and volume of water in Africa was completely wrong. Furthermore I learned access to water had more to do with politics rather than volume or variability of precipitation. My first blog can therefore best be described as my revelation of water and politics. Specifically this relation is what grabbed my attention most. In the beginning of blogging I struggled with finding topics to write about. Politics is everywhere, where do I start? An article about Ethiopian’s Grand Renaissance Dam got me interested in what is called shared water resources management (SWRM). This comprises all water resources that are shared between different kinds of actors that all have an interest in the water resource. I found out that in a lot of cases water resources cover territories in different countries. Because water bodies are not limited to one specific territory but shared between different groups, and interests, conflict is likely to arise. Different groups have different interests and should therefore cooperate in fulfilling everyone’s needs. However power relations between the different interest groups are asymmetric. Some actors have more power than others, for instance national government have more power than small marginalised local groups and upstream riparian states often have more power than their downstream counterparts. These different power relations are key to understanding why some people have access to water and why some don’t. 

In my blogs I tried to involve as many interest groups as possible and tried to unveil the different power relations between actors in specific cases. I have discussed SWRM among the Nile riparian states, the Zambezi riparian states and the countries that are using the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. I have also touched upon  topics that are less place specific but happen all over Africa such as water grabbing. And finally I have discussed global actors in the case of the Akosombo dam in Ghana.

So what are my main findings after writing these blogs? First of all, the (extreme) asymmetry in power between different interest groups. Often, the national (or global) actor has a dominance over the local and region interests. National governments make decisions without paying any attention to local interest and often even exclude local groups in their decision-making. They do this under the guise of national interest and development rather than local decline. Furthermore have found out that making decisions about water management is not as simple is one might think. Data is often manipulated or faked due to a lack of adequate instruments to measure water quality, volume and variability. Therefore making wrong decisions is frequent. A third finding is the vitality of water for human kind. The reason why conflicts over water are happening is because of its great value. We must never underestimate the importance of water for humankind and its survival. Conflicts about water are serious and must be solved including all interest groups that are involved. I will never forget what the Egyptian president said about the construction of the GERD and its possible threat to Egypt’s water security: We would go over war for our water resources. This statement made me realise how serious water affairs are. I can’t blame Egypt for defending itself in survival. In the end we all need it to survive.

My final remark on this blog is that I feel more aware of the importance of water and the privileged position I find myself in, having access to sufficient and good quality water. I hope the world will shift into a world with equal water access in which we can all flourish and don’t have to suffer from the consequence of a lack of fresh water.