SADC develops protocols to manage water resources

By Pelekelo Liswaniso in Maputo, Mozambique

Pumulo Sililo is a 67 - year old man of Simungoma village in Zambia’s Sesheke district. He retired from the Copperbelt where he had worked for close to thirty years at one of the mines but decided to settle in the village with his wife Muyunda and their three children.

This was twelve years ago. At the time of his relocation from the bright lights of Kitwe on the Copperbelt, Sililo thought it would be an easy change to move from the city and settle in the village with his pension benefits and the long-held belief that life is cheap in the rural areas.

However, life has not been rosy for the Sililo´s family. All their dreams of a happy rural life just fizzled out in no time and the family became sober to the grim realities of rural life.

Food was hard to come by because of the frequent poor rains. The little food they would grow in the fields was hardly enough to see the family through to the next season. They ended up buying mealie meal, the staple food and other necessities, and in no time Sililo’s hard earned pension ran out. He became an ordinary village as poor as any other in Sesheke district, daily being haunted by the extreme poverty, disease and hunger.

Fresh water for drinking and for bathing was difficult to find and became an agonising task to search for. Each day Sililo’s wife and children have to walk long distances, sometime for as long as ten kilometres in search of water, which they draw from dirty streams or shallow ponds.

His children are frequent victims of diarrhoea, dysentery and other water borne diseases because of poor sanitation. Their village has no toilets or pit latrines and they have to answer the call of nature from nearby bushes, posing a health risk to the family and other villagers.

Sililo had hoped to have electrical power in his house but even after living for 15 years in the village, that dream has s remained a pipe dream although there are electric power lines passing over his village.

Poor Sililo and his family are but an example of the many rural dwellers and poor people in rural and peri-urban of Zambia and in neighbouring countries that are still exposed to the harsh realities of life of marginalised communities who have been left to the vagaries of nature including the impact of the dreaded HIV/AIDS pandemic.

They are part of a vicious circle of poverty ravaging most, if not all the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Economic development in general has been slow in the region because of a wide range of factors - lack of water being probably the main contributing factor.


Mama Tshepo, a small scale farmer in Limpopo, South Africa, made a moving presentation in a wheel chair in Maputo, Mozambque, last week, highlighting the plight of poor South Africans saying authorities in SADC need to get down to the local people and help them come out of poverty and strenghthen local communities.

Mama Tshepo, who is in her late 70´s, described herself as a “loose cannon” saying despite her advanced age, she has enough energy which has assisted her to successfully harvest rainwater, combined with organic farming techniques, to boost agricultural produce in her gardens and feed her family. Most villagers in her age in South Africa, she said, were suffering and need help.

Another activist, Mr Kunda Chimambo, a community leader in Zambia´s Chalimbana River Catchment area, east of Lusaka, made a passionate appeal to the Zambian government to protect water recharge areas in forests so that there is continous flow of water to rural communities.

“If recharge areas are degraded, the poor become more vulnerable and this complicates their livelihoods because the quality and quantity of water become more scarce,” Mr Chimambo said.

“ Sewer disposal in natural streams from sinks further contaminates water upon which communities living at the lower ends of the streams depend and this has health implications,”he added, citing Chalimbana area as an example of sewer disposal, which requires control to protect the lives of the poor villagers in Chingwe, east of Lusaka.

Water infrastructure, be it for domestic and industrial water supply, sanitation, hydropower generation, irrigation, flood control, drainage, is inadequate in Zambia and the SADC region in general and often operates inefficiently due to problems of operation and maintenance or simply lack of it.

Despite SADC being home to 15 shared watercourses, the region remains water deficient resulting in a mismatch between water availability and water demand. This has resulted in lack of water for food, for sanitation and other needs causing misery in most communities.
“Water scarcity continues to cause region-wide negative impact on human populations and today not one SADC member state demonstrates a score higher than 61.9 on the Water Poverty Index. More than half of the Sub-Saharan population lack access to safe water while more than 40 percent lack adequate sanitation,” said Remigios Makumbe, the SADC Director of Infrastructure and Services.

Other challenges that the region confronts include irrigation which accounts for approximately 70 percent of the water consumption in the region but shows insufficient ground water protection and widely varying efficiency rates.

Another example is the energy sector. Water is a very important factor in the energy equation as it provides the source of hydropower, which must be further harnessed to avoid serious energy shortages in the region.

Some studies from the region indicate that hydroelectric generation accounts for about 20% of the total energy supply to SADC countries. However, the undeveloped hydro-power potential is very high resulting in most people especially in rural areas living without electricity.

According to the information obtained by Southern Africa Power Pool (SAPP), 50% of short-term projects required to improve energy supplies and avoid energy shortfalls involve hydropower, thereby depending on the water resources of the region.

If water is not well harnessed, majority of the populations in the region will therefore continue wallowing in extreme poverty and lack of electricity for many years to come.

All is, however, not lost because there is hope on the horizon. Sililo and his siblings could possibly come out of their misery in the near future.

Governments in the SADC region together with non-governmental organisations, social activists and other stakeholders have pledged to introduce interventions in their economic plans to fight poverty and its offshoots of huger, disease afflicting most communities like Sililo´s family.

This came to light at the just ended 7th SADC Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue held in Maputo, Mozambique at which the region resolved to change the course of development and focus on alleviating the plight of the poor in the region.

SADC comprises South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Angola, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

“The main challenge of our generation is to help the poorest of the poor to escape the misery of extreme poverty so that they begin their own ascent up the ladder of economic development. In this way we will have a better world for all of us,” said Mr Remigious Makumbe, SADC Director of Infrastructure and Services.

Speaking at the opening of the 2007 SADC Dialogue at Joachim Chissano International Conference Centre, in Maputo, Mozambique, Mr Makumbe pointed out that central to the suffering of most of the people in the region was poor access to water.

He disclosed that various instruments have been developed at the regional level with regard to the management and development of water resources in the region. These include the SADC Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses which was adopted in 2000 and came into force in 2003.

State parties to this Protocol have undertaken to harmonise the water uses in the shared watercourses and maintain a proper balance between resource development and enhancement of the environment to promote sustainable development and a higher standard of living for people in the region.

“SADC also has a Regional Water Strategy that translates the policy further into implementable strategies. In addition, SADC is addressing the water management challenges in the region through a number of programmes and projects that form part of the Regional Strategic Action Plan for Integrated Water Resources Development and Management which is a component of the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan,” Mr Makumbe said.

All these instruments do provide a framework for sustainable, integrated and coordinated development, utilisation, protection and control of national and trans-boundary water resources in the SADC region for the promotion of socio-economic development, regional integration and improvement of the quality of life to all people in the region.

SADC recognizes that water is the engine for economic growth and that member states have adopted Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) as the fundamental approach to water resources management to ensure that water is adequately contributing to poverty eradication, regional integration and socio-economic development in a sustainable manner.

The IWRM principles have been accepted by all member SADC States who are increasingly recognizing that water resources in the SADC region are limited, demands are rising rapidly and the potential for disastrous water shortages is high unless these resources are managed with great care and for the benefit of all.

Zambia’s Permanent Secretary for Economic Planning in the Ministry of Finance and National Planning, James Mulungushi said since water is cross cutting in all sectors of economic development like gender and environment , there is need for all actors in the planning process to involve all stakeholders and not only water engineers and natural resource conservationists.

“Make different sectors appreciate the role of water…and ensure that there is bottom – up and top-down planning,” Mr. Mulungushi said.

He said if water is a key ingredient in economic development, there is need to conserve it, and use it in a sustainable way,” Mr Mulungushi said, adding that this calls for collaboration by all stakeholders at all levels including the catchment, country and international levels.

Mr Mulungushi said this in a key note address to the just ended 7th Multi-Stakeholder Water Dialogue at Joachim Chisano International Conference Centre in Maputo, Mozambique.

At household level, he said, IWRM should translate into food security, improved health, and access to clean energy sources as well as a source of income.

At National level, it should go beyond partnerships and move to implementation plans.

At international level, IWRM should go beyond observing international agreements, conventions, global values and good neighbourliness to sustainable utilization. Indeed, if all these interventions were made, the suffering being experienced by the likes of Silolo´s family and others would become a mere statistic and history for Africa.

Meanwhile, former diplomat in Lesotho, Reggie Teka Teka was elected chairperson of the Global Water Partnership (GWP) Southern Africa after polling 13 votes beating Malawian Geologist, Grain Malunga, who polled 6 votes and Gender activist Norma Neseni of Zimbabwe, who polled 4 votes during the 7th Consulting Partners meeting held at Cardoso hotel in Maputo last week.

Mr Teka Teka pledged to raise the agenda of IWRM in the SADC region and called for cooperation amongst country water partnerships in the fight against poverty in the sub region.