Access to water for all requires government investment – Taal

How prepared is Africa to navigate the water, energy and food nexus?
 Well as you know Africa has been navigating  this for some time now, whether it’s on the right way is something that we need to look at.
 But I think the nexus is talking about coming together, instead of dealing with the sectors in their silos to have a broader view. When you’re dealing with energy and developing policies for energy, you have to look at the impact it will have on water and vice versa, because the energy sector uses a lot of water.
 We have discovered that any sector dealing with water doesn’t look at the cost of water, their interest is just to have the water and for free. The water community is telling them, that you have to consider the value of water, so when you’re doing your plan for energy, bring the water people in the sector in the country to discuss with them, so that it’s an integrated one, same for agriculture. 75 per cent of water is used for irrigation so when the agriculture ministry is discussing their strategy or discussing with external partners who want to invest on large scale agriculture, when they are discussing those issues the water minister is not in the meeting. The water minister should be there to guide on the availability of water and how it could be used and priced. So we are trying to bring water for food security, water for energy and water for drinking, these should be looked in an integrated way.
 Now, the challenge we face is that each sector is in different ministry and we know how ministries work. Every ministry is trying to hold on to what they have, so that they can push their own agenda. The water minister is very much interested in water; we are seeing some positive steps in countries like Nigeria that is constructing multi-purpose dams that provide electricity, water for agriculture, fisheries and even tourism.

 African countries are building more hydro-power dams for power generation. Is that a healthy development for our water?
 That is a good development for our water. Africa is the most undammed continent; we are only using about 8 per cent of our potential for hydro which is still small, and to use more we need to invest in infrastructure such as dams. There was a generation that said that dam is not good; that it’s an environmental problem, risk and so forth. We have passed that age. Before these dams were constructed research is done, environmental studies are carried out etc. So we need the dams to provide us energy for irrigation and also for flood control.

 Is the developed world or the international community in agreement with the dams we are building?
 Whether they agree or not they should not dictate to us because in most of the developed countries like Sweden you’ll know that about 60 per cent of their energy comes from hydro dams; if you go to America they have dams all over the place, they have all developed using dams and they have the resources. Why can’t we use our resources? We learn from their mistakes, they have dams a long time ago, in those days we didn’t have environmental studies and so on, but we learned from their mistakes.
 So no one should stop us, saying we cannot construct dam because of environmental issues, we looked at the environmental impact studies, any structure will have positive and negative impact, you want to minimise the negative effect once we minimise the negative lets fire, and that’s what we are previewing in Africa.

 Is AMCOW putting in place any mechanism for accountability and transparency in public funds used in building these dams?
 AMCOW has summoned a peer review, evaluation, monitoring, and part of governance structure indicators for governance – governance is very important, it has to be looked at – transparency and integrity and we try to monitor and encourage government to involve the population.
 Recently, last month, in Nigeria they had a stakeholders meeting when they were looking at the policy and strategy for water. That is an opportunity for everybody to look at the document before it goes for approval, before it becomes a law so that’s transparency and we hope that lots of countries will do that and they are doing that and am encouraged.

 On MDGs and water, it looks like most countries in Africa won’t make it?
 Yes it’s unfortunate but at least there have been positive steps toward making it. A lot of countries will make it but the rate has been slow. The positive thing is that there have been a lot of
 investment on water from the MDGs and we have learnt from the MDGs. Now we are coming to the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 and the unfinished business. What we have learnt from the MDGs will flow over into the SDGs and we will continue that with new things that are simpler to be done with implementation strategy.
 The MDGs did not have an implementation mechanism and financing mechanism, we have learnt from that mistake. The MDGs was not negotiated, it was not a consensus government, it was just dropped on us and we signed on to it. The SDGs for the last two years have been negotiated and we are negotiating all the way to June 2015 and we hope that we will be able to have the document to be able to reach the goals.

Considering all that AMCOW has done, when do we hope a child will no longer trek kilometres before getting water?
 I’m very hopeful on that because the governments are really thinking seriously about that. We are saying that access to water should be universal, everybody should have access to water but access to water doesn’t mean that every village has water. If you have to trek to get water it means you have access but the time to get the water.
 One of the things that we will be pushing is encouraging governments to meet their commitments and declarations of making water available, so that the girl-child does not go to fetch water the whole day and be deprived of going to school. Government will have to invest, we cannot wait for external donors to invest, governments have to invest from their national budget and national resources and implemented with partners.