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Solving the Water Crisis: Increase Supplies or Improve Management?

An underground reservoir in a Bedouin community near Marsah Mutrah, Egypt. (IDRC Photo: Peter Bennett)

2004-06-03

In the arid countryside of central Morocco, along the road from Beni Mellal to Marrakesh, fetching water is children's work. Across rocky plains where skinny goats scrounge the scant vegetation, boys and girls as young as three or four lead donkeys festooned with multicoloured containers from the ochre mud-walled houses to the communal well.

Their daily task is likely to become more arduous as Morocco continues to suffer more frequent and prolonged periods of drought. The situation is no different in other countries of North Africa and the Middle East where a water crisis threatens. But if this region is among the hardest hit by water scarcity, it is not alone.

The statistics are stark. "Right now, more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water," says water expert Dr David B. Brooks, and "within the next 25 years, fully one-third of the world's population will experience severe water scarcity." Most of these people live in the poorer — hotter — countries of the South where disparities in the availability of fresh water are truly a matter of life and death.

For people in these areas, there are only two options: find more water, or better manage existing supplies. Clearly, the first is unrealistic. Most everywhere, the best and cheapest sources of water are in use and some regions are approaching their limits. In the Middle East, for instance, close to 60% of all reasonably available fresh water is already being withdrawn. In Eastern Europe the figure stands at 41%.

As Brooks explains in Water:Local-level Management, recently published by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), large-scale, centralized water management has gone about as far as it can in many regions. There are no more big rivers to dam; aquifers are being mined to exhaustion; vast irrigation schemes have reached their limits. Big engineering projects are growing increasingly expensive and they also often cause intolerable harm to the environment. And these projects frequently incite a justifiable fear and resistance. "Countries may not go to war for water," he writes, "but governments do fall because of failures to deliver enough good water to their own citizens."

A new look at the problem

The second option — better managing existing supplies — holds greater promise. Thirty years of research supported by IDRC in developing countries shows that community-based or local water management could play a large role in efforts to supply clean water to all. It is at this level that the effects of water scarcity are most keenly felt and here that the solutions must be implemented, notes Brooks. Indeed, he says, local management is essential to the sustainable exploitation of scarce water supplies.

What's more, local resource management empowers people to take part in decisions that shape their own futures. And it encourages the integration of traditional knowledge with innovative science to promote fair and efficient supply management. "In this way," he says, "water degradation and shortage can be transformed into sustainable efficiency."

That's the theory. Does it work in practice? Water: Local-level Management describes some of the responses to water scarcity being mounted in households, farmers' fields, villages, and city neighbourhoods across the developing world. Many of them have been — and are — very successful, whether they be as simple as improving the age-old practice of harvesting rain by developing better catchment and storage containers, or implementing new, easy-to-use water quality testing kits that enable communities to monitor local water supplies.

From theory to practice

Overall, says Brooks, the research shows that traditional knowledge and practices often point the way to more effective local management of water supplies. But, he adds, technology is only one piece of the puzzle. Also needed are the timely application of research, enabling policies, and inclusive governance structures.

In the stony highlands of Yemen, for instance, farming has depended for centuries on an intricate system of water-saving terraces that conserve fertile soils and control erosion — albeit at the cost of brutally hard labour. In recent decades, however, these terraces have fallen into disrepair.

Researchers looking at the problem found that the obvious cause — a shortage of labour as more men sought higher-paying work in cities — was only partly responsible. A lack of clearly defined obligations between landlords and tenants for field maintenance and cost-sharing also took its toll on the terraces, as did a lack of credit for farmers to invest in their own water management. Experimentation found ways to rebuild the old terraces with less labour and at an acceptable cost. And when conserving field water made food production more profitable, farming acquired a new lustre. "In short, reviving traditional water management approaches can require both technical and policy ingenuity," says Brooks, "but the rewards can be significant."

There are no simple solutions

IDRC's experience has clearly shown that social, economic, and political factors are as crucial to the successful application of research and management as is the choice of technology. Perhaps no project shows this more clearly than the much publicized fog catchers, first tested and installed along the parched Pacific coast of Latin America. The idea was elegantly and ingeniously simple: fine mesh netting was braced against the damp wind so that water droplets could condense on the filaments, then collect in troughs and flow by pipe to where it was needed. First developed in the mid-1980s with funding from IDRC and UNESCO, the technology proved sound. By the early 1990s, for instance, one array near the Chilean village of Chungungo supplied some 11,000 litres of water a day, transforming the community. (For more information, read "Collecting Fog on El Tofo," by Stephen Dale.)

Today, however, the shredded nets flap in the wind, tattered symbols of an idea gone wrong. What happened? Follow-up research has shown that producing water from fog can be costlier than available alternatives — in Chungungo's case, delivering water by truck. The nets also tear, pipes leak, and strong winds can blow the whole structure over. Continuous maintenance calls for a new kind of governance that has to be organized and sustained by the local community, Brooks explains. In Chile, concerns were also expressed about possible airborne contamination of the water by heavy metals from area mines.

But perhaps more important, in the water supply hierarchy, fog catchers came to be regarded by local communities as poor cousins to pipelines or other modern supply systems. As now-retired Director of the Special Initiatives Division at IDRC Chris Smart explains, "people have certain visions of what it means to be developed, and one of them is that water should be brought to you by the state and you should never have to think about it."

Lessons learned

And that is perhaps the crux of the water management issue and one of the key lessons learned from these and other efforts. You must accept social custom and cultural norms as a given. However, these can be changed when people see the value in change. Any new technology or solution must make economic sense, but that is often not enough: non economic factors, such as the role of men and women, are equally important. In rural areas and in developing countries, tradition often rules access to water, says Brooks. The management of water rights is therefore crucial.

There is little doubt that if these and other efforts are to continue and to expand, local people will need ongoing support from their governments. In some cases, this will include delegating power to make decisions about which options to pursue and which techniques to employ.

And that may be the most difficult and most crucial lesson of all. Devolution of the power to manage water — not just to fix leaks and read metres — will not come easily. It will require a vision that indicates that management by villages and communities may be the best — if not the only — way to deliver water and conserve its quality.

Michelle Hibler is Chief, Writing and Translation in IDRC's Communications Division.

Water: Local-level Management by David B. Brooks was published by IDRC in 2002 as part of its In_Focus series. The book is available full-text online. Also visit IDRC’s Water Dossier.

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