Link between between water scarcity and access to safe water in Africa

This blog aims to find out if there is any link between between water scarcity and access to safe water in Africa

What is water scarcity ?

Absolute water scarcity is when more than 1000 people complete for a single flow unit of water of 100 000 m3/ year the same as 1000 m3/person/year Falkenmark m 1989.  While water stress is 600 m3/person/year. Falkenmark argues that for good health people need a min of 100 l of water every day for drinking, cooking and cleaning.

The water stress index has become the most used measure of water scarcity and was created by Falkenmark m 1989 and is based on mean annual river discharge per year divided by population while this is good and can be easily used and applied around the world.
In Damkjaer S and Tayler R 2017 paper they are critical of the water stress index. The problem with the index is that it is over reliant on river run off, and doesn't take into account that the landscape and climate is changeable, it also does not take into account ground water and storm flow. It was created to explore the link between drought and famines taking place in Africa in the 1980s and help create an early warming system for people.
The model was developed in Israel, does that ring alarm bells for anyone ??. Israel uses high tec irrigation system while in Uganda 95 % of the agriculture is rain fed so if your country doesn't use the high tec irrigation systems like Israel then the model is very much irrelevant and the fact that that the boundaries that define water scarcity as represented in figure 1 is based from Israel again it is not that useful to then be applied to countries in Africa.
The index also does not also look at the relationship between water availability and water access, so it doesn't matter how much water there might be under ground for example if you can accesses it is useless.

Figure 1 - different levels of water scarily  - source: Falkenmark m 1989.

Is water scarcity related to access to safe water ?

In figure 2 it shows countries in north Africa that have water scarcity such as Egypt and Morocco, these are classed as water stress or have water scarcity. Damkjaer S and Tayler R 2017 report found that there is no clear relationship between water scarcity and access to safe water as over 90 % of these countries in North Africa in figure 2 has access to safe drinking water. It is not only these countries in North Africa, figure 3 includes more examples for example South Africa is stated by the index to have absolute water scarcity but in fact has high levels of access to safe drinking water, so therefore have good sanitation.


Figure 2 - shows the national - scale water scarcity as defined by the water stress index in 2014 - source: Damkjaer S and Tayler R 2017




Figure 3 - Access to safe water - source Damkjaer S and Tayler R 2017