Sunday Alamba/AP Photo
A young woman carries bags of sachet water in Baruwa Lagos, Nigeria, March 22, 2017.
In mid-November, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, responded to weeks of drought by rationing water to residents and businesses. But some sections of the city of nearly seven million people only have running water once a week—if at all.
With the developed world focused on decarbonization and the energy transition, an ongoing water crisis in Africa and other regions of the Global South has not received the same level of concern. Even at COP26, a newly formed Water and Climate Coalition banded together with the mission to “raise awareness, share experience and provide guidance” about the issues.
But with the climate emergency intensifying, the critical importance of public control of water runs headlong into the sometimes debilitating role played by international financial institutions in funding water projects that fail to deliver.
Many African countries rely on Western governments and international financial institutional investment to build, manage, and maintain water infrastructure. As of 2019, the World Bank has funded $8.2 billion in water sector projects in sub-Saharan Africa, the highest investment in any region, representing over one-quarter of its entire Water Global Practice portfolio. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, has invested more than $1.4 billion globally in private water corporations since 1993 and has committed to major annual increases.
These investments would appear to benefit countries that cannot raise the tremendous sums needed to build, manage, and maintain water supplies. But water access remains poor, and many African countries are given little to no opportunity to consider funding opportunities outside of privatization. Instead, these life-altering decisions are made by private companies and by financial entities controlled by member governments in the developed world.
Like similar undertakings in the United States and Europe, many African private water projects have failed repeatedly, prompting national officials or local activists to press for remunicipalization.
“Corporations and institutions like the World Bank are trying to suck water and profits out of Africa as though they have a massive drinking straw,” Akinbode Oluwafemi, the executive director of Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), an influential Pan-African environmental organization, told an international press briefing in October during the CAPPA-sponsored Africa Week of Action Against Water Privatization.
Like similar undertakings in the United States and Europe, many African private water projects have failed repeatedly, prompting national officials or local activists to press for remunicipalization, the transfer of privatized assets that were once run by local or national agencies back to public control.
The Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Corporation (DAWASCO) was established after the Tanzania government stepped in to end its especially disastrous experience with water privatization. In 2003, City Water Services (CWS), a private utility company owned by Britain's Biwater International and Germany’s Gauff Ingenieure, won a contract with the Tanzanian government to provide water to Dar es Salaam. But two years later, the private utility had only invested less than half of the $8.5 million needed to update the city’s 50-year-old pipe network, which led to water shortages and erratic services for city residents. Tanzania eventually won a lawsuit against Biwater.
For several years, Tanzania and its international and private-sector partners tried to press forward with the contract before the government pulled the plug on the private company and set up DAWASCO in 2005. A report found that CWS officials were not able to rise to the immense challenges of rescuing a dilapidated water system, collecting customers’ payments, and navigating the political environment. Early on, DAWASCO managed improvements in some areas, such as repairing leaks and extending service connections. But current drought conditions have magnified the numerous water quality, connection, revenue, and management issues. The reliance on international funding that comes with complex conditions which countries struggle to meet also complicates matters.
In Nigeria, grassroots activists have been fighting privatization for decades. During the Africa Week of Action, a group of women demonstrators unsuccessfully tried to enter a state government building in the state of Lagos to confront lawmakers and deliver petitions opposing further privatization. Like Dar es Salaam, Lagos has struggled with aging infrastructure, inconsistent supplies for users, regulatory failures, and budget difficulties. A 2020 investigation by CAPPA on waterworks in Lagos found many individual water distribution plants functioning inconsistently or not at all, which left the nearly 15 million residents of one of the largest cities in the world vulnerable to COVID-19 and other diseases and forced to rely on private water sellers.
Beginning in the late 1990s, the IFC encouraged the Nigerian government to support public-private partnerships and other investments such as privatizing the Lagos Water Corporation. However, public and other reform efforts have largely collapsed one after another, stoking years of protests over dismal water access and deteriorating water quality.
CAPPA launched an “Our Water Our Right” campaign to specifically take aim at the World Bank–led privatization push. Despite defeating yet another World Bank–supported federal water proposal aimed at strengthening new public-private partnerships this past spring, Nigerian water rights activists fear that they have not seen the end of these proposals and that federal lawmakers’ deliberations over water access will continue to exclude water advocates and concerned citizens as the crises of climate and scarcity accelerate.
