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Norms and transboundary co-operation in Africa : the cases of the Orange-Senqu and Nile rivers

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Utility reforms and performance of the urban water sector in Africa

Many national water policies propagate community-based participatory approaches to overcome weaknesses in supply-driven rural water provision, operation, and maintenance. Citizen involvement is thought to stimulate bottom-up accountability and broaden the information base, which may enrich design and implementation processes and foster improved water accessibility and sustainability. Practices on the ground, however, are embedded in socio-political realities which mediate possible beneficial effects of participatory approaches. This paper builds on full social network data collected in a Ugandan village to study the social and political reality of two distinct levels of participation, i.e. local information sharing among citizens and a more active appeal to fellow citizens to improve water services. We use Logistic Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure to explore what type of actor and network traits influence information sharing and whether the same factors are in play in the demand for action to remedy water-related problems. Whereas social aspects (social support relations) and homophily (using the same water source, the same gender) play an important role in information sharing, it is the educational level, in particular, of the villager who is called upon that is important when villagers demand action. Our findings also demonstrate that those most in need of safe water do not mobilize their information sharing ties to demand for action. This indicates that building local water policies and practice exclusively on locally existing demand for action may fail to capture the needs of the most deprived citizens.

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Look Who's Talking. Explaining Water-Related Information Sharing and Demand for Action Among Ugandan Villagers.

Underground water abstraction: indirect effects of urbanization on the countryside

RURAL WATER DEVELOPMENT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN UGANDA AND TANZANIA by Paola de Cecco Global transnational efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving the world population lacking access to improved water supplies are failing to address sustainable development in sub-Saharan rural communities. These efforts have been driven largely by water governance strategies centered on the controversial principle that water is an economic good, and as such, the development of water services shall be left to the supply-demand mechanisms regulating commodities’ markets. Uganda and Tanzania have embraced these strategies to varying degrees and have made strikingly different progress in developing their rural water sector. Uganda has maintained a steady rate of improvement in rural water coverage, while Tanzania has not. This comparative study between Tanzania’s and Uganda’s water governance principles and development approaches combined qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews and water policies with participant observation of two case studies. The results of the study suggest the success of Uganda’s approach to water governance stems from the government commitment to retaining its role of providing basic services for the poorest strata of the population, de facto guaranteeing the constitutional right to water for all citizens irrespective of their economic status.

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Rural Water Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Comparative Study between Uganda and Tanzania

ed by Martin E. Jansson The use and control of water resources presents a bewildering array of problems, some technological, some economic, some social, in which, without a guiding principle, it is easy to lose one's way. The vastness of our country, the wide range of climate and topography, the abrupt seasonal changes affecting most of our watersheds, all tend to make the formulation of a national water policy difficult. At the same time they make it essential. Nothing short of a national policy can deal effectively, justly, and democratically with the situation. It is no longer possible to regard either water or land as purely private property, unaffected with a public interest. Whatever the legal rights, no owner has the moral right to waste a national resource or to put it to uses which are generally harmful. He is not entitled to burn his own forests, allow his own land to be forever impoverished through the washing away of the fertile topsoil, or permit his streams to contribute an unnecessary drop to a major flood. Similarly, no neighborhood has a moral right to follow water policies which will injure other neighborhoods, nor has any State or region a right to impair the general good. The Golden Rule is no fantastic dream in the use and control of water. It is the only rule that makes good law and good policy. PRINCIPLES AND POLICIES OF USE AND CONTROL OF WATER RESOURCES

Martin E. Jansson

Papers

A National Water Policy