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This week, Dakar hosted the 9th World Water Forum, organized for the first time on the African continent. The WATHI site offers a dossier on this crucial issue of access to water in West Africa.
Last week, I mentioned the question of the day-to-day functioning of health structures. Among the many reasons for the frustrations of the users of these structures, regular water cuts even in large hospitals. So yes, water, when it is drinkable, is health, it is life, it is a major determinant of individual and collective well-being. It is also a factor and a marker of extreme inequalities. On average, an inhabitant of the Sahel has less than 10 liters of water per day, while an inhabitant of Europe consumes on average nearly 150 liters per day and that of North America, more than 250 liters per day.
According to the United Nations water report published in March 2021, only one in four Africans has access to a safe source of drinking water. In his opening address to the Global Forum, Senegalese President Macky Sall recalled that women and girls spend thousands of hours in their lives carrying water. This is done to the detriment, in particular, of the education of girls.
The difficulties of access to drinking water do not only concern rural areas
Even in Dakar, in several neighborhoods, women and children walk around with basins in search of water for their daily needs, and sometimes knock on the doors of houses that have tanks on the roofs and booster pumps. But, even with these devices, which are only accessible to privileged families, it happens that you do not see a single drop of water coming out of the taps for a week or more. Suffice to say that good humor quickly disappears in these circumstances.
The spectacle of the collection of water with cans, we see it in several other cities of the continent. It’s an invaluable waste of time that could have been used for more productive purposes. In this area as in many others, today’s serious failures were built on decades of underinvestment in infrastructure even as the population doubled, tripled or more.
But we must also highlight institutions that do their job and show that the States of the region can cooperate effectively to manage common resources. This is the case of the Organization for the Development of the Senegal River, the OMVS.
We published in 2017 on the WATHI website, as part of a file on regional organizations, an interview with one of the executives of the OMVS, Amadou Lamine Ndiaye. He recalled that in 1972, the organization had taken over from the Organization of Senegalese Riparian States created in 1969 on the initiative of four countries, Guinea, Senegal, Mali and Mauritania. Among the fundamental missions of the OMVS, the fight against desertification and aridity in the context of the great droughts of the 1970s.
The OMVS has put in place a regime which is still considered today as a model of cooperation in the use of the waters of an international watercourse for hydroelectric, agricultural and navigation purposes. The principle of “common and indivisible property” governs all common works in the Senegal basin and implies an equitable sharing of benefits between all Member States.
An organization like this is not well known to citizens even though it plays a valuable role. This is also an opportunity to recall that another organization that has been much criticized for its decisions in the political field, ECOWAS, contributes significantly to advancing the countries of the region in crucial areas, such as access to electricity through network interconnection programs and the development of decentralized systems for rural electrification. It is not useless to recall it. Nothing should jeopardize the processes of cooperation and regional integration.
The initiative “Water challenges in West Africa” on the website of HE SAID