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BURKINA FASO: Innovation and education needed to head off water
war
OUAGADOUGOU, 14 September 2007
(IRIN) - Running his fingers over a
map of Burkina Faso, stabbing at a
dozen vowel-laden names of towns
and villages, Abdramane Sow traces
out what senior international officials
are warning could be the frontline in
Africa’s next major war. These are all
places where local communities have
come to blows over who will use the
available water.
In one village close to the border with
Nigeria, women with fistulas were
stopped from using water points
Photo: Nicholas Reader/IRIN
because it was thought they would
spread infection. In another village in
Man drinking water drawn from a home-made well in northern Burkina Faso.
the far north of the country, deep
Water tables are sinking, forcing many people to abandon their villages and
head to the less arid south, risking conflict
inside the desert, access to water
points is being limited according to
peoples’ religion. On the outskirts of the country’s second city Bobo Dioulasso, agriculturalists, animal
herders, a local village and the state water company were at loggerheads recently over access to a
reservoir.
“Mostly, these are not major conflicts yet,” explained Sow, a researcher working on water conflicts at
the University of Ouagadougou’s Centre for Economic and Social Studies who has mapped out the
underlying dynamics behind local squabbles over water all over the country. “The worst fights seem to
happen not where there is no water, but where it exists, as people can’t agree on how to share among
them.”
A world aflame?
Burkina Faso’s local water squabbles are in the world’s spotlight, unusual attention in a region where
year-round malnutrition that stunts the growth of hundreds of thousands of children rarely warrants a
report in the international media.
Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the
United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) in June used the Sahel region of West
Africa, which includes Burkina Faso, Niger,
Mali and Mauritania, as an example of a place
where the increasing spread of the desert is
forcing population movements and communal
clashes. He warned these conflicts could lead
to “a world in flames”.
Likewise Margaret Beckett, Britain’s Foreign
Secretary, has warned that “the political
stability of entire nations” is at risk from
climate change, and predicted more failed
states as a result.
And on 12 September, the prestigious
International Institite for Strategic Studies in
London – best known for its Cold War work
weighing up nuclear stand-offs – equated the
effects of climate change to those of a nuclear
war. “The security dimension will come
Photo
increasingly to the forefront as countries
Map of Burkina Faso
begin to see falls in available resources and
economic vitality, increased stress on their
armed forces, greater instability in regions of strategic import, increases in ethnic rivalries and a
widening gap between rich and poor,” the Institute predicted.
Old news
The message is not news to Burkina Faso’s leaders. Faced with annual population growth of almost 3
percent in a landlocked country which does not even have a river traversing its entire territory, at the
same time as a decline in overall rainfall, the country has already developed major water projects for
the two main urban areas, the capital Ouagadougou and the second city Bobo Dioulasso, which use
rainwater harvesting, underground reservoirs and tapping into underground water resources to keep
water flowing.
Rural areas are conspicuously ignored in the government’s plans. According to the African
Development Bank (ADB), in urban areas of Burkina Faso the proportion of the population with access
to running water rose from 66.3 percent in 1993-94 to 88.5 percent in 2003. In rural areas, in the
same period, the rate fell from 4.8 percent to 4 percent, and access to well water fell even further,
from 90 percent in 1993 and 92 percent in 1999 to 78.4 percent in 2003.
Since 1960, the state, NGOs and the UN have installed some 50,000 wells around the country, but
perhaps as many as half of them are believed by NGOs who have surveyed the country to be broken
down.
Meanwhile, Burkina Faso’s total public investment in water services is US$13.3 million per year for
water, and US$3.96 for sanitation. The ADB estimates that for Burkina Faso to meet its millennium
development goal on water and sanitation by 2015, it would have to spend US$116.25 million each
year over the next nine years.
Burkina Faso reflects a broader African
trend. Again according to ADB data,
between 1990 and 2004, 10 million
people gained access to clean water
facilities, but in the same 14-year
period, population growth meant the
total number of people without access
to clean water actually grew by 60
million. The ADB says the problem is
part cash, but also poor management
and pollution of existing resources.
Photo: Nicholas Reader/IRIN
Man draws water from well in northern Burkina Faso. There is better technology
but it is out of reach of most poor people
places it judges will best serve it.
“The coverage of zones with new
water facilities is a political decision,”
said Yerefolo Malle, head of the nongovernmental organisation WaterAid in
Burkina Faso, pointing out that the
cash-strapped government must
allocate its scarce resources to the
“Urban centres are where political will is placed to avoid social clashes. We know in rural areas there is
pressure, but a town of even 60,000 disgruntled people is not the same thing as 2 million. Leaders
here have to make decisions about the future and they analyse it in these terms.”
Tip of the iceberg
Rainfall in Burkina Faso is dwindling further every year, notwithstanding floods this year which have
devastated large parts of the country. Anecdotal evidence shows that more and more people are
abandoning villages in the north of the country to try to establish themselves in the wetter south.
Hundreds of thousands of Burkinabe have already moved so far south that they have crossed in Cote
d’Ivoire and Ghana, raising the spectre of fights between animal herders and farmers who have
competing needs spilling across borders.
In a break from the apparently small, intra-communal fights that have happened before, in August
2,000 people, among them 1,400 children, were forced to flee their homes by fighting between animal
herders and farmers in Zounweogo province. Details of the fighting remain murky.
Sow agrees that the handful of rural conflicts his institute is mapping now could be the tip of the
iceberg, if rainfall keeps decreasing while the country’s population continues to surge. “We could see a
time when the water is all gone, and then we would see more and more people migrating and creating
conflict,” he said. “Adaptation is the key. We have to find ways the community can adapt to climate
change – and fast, faster than the change itself is happening.”
Training
Burkina Faso might be an example of the worst case scenario of changes in the climate in Africa. It
also provides the promise of a less Malthusian future.
One prominent example of how Burkina Faso is leading the way to
engineer itself a better future is the donor-funded 2ie International
Institute for Water and Environmental Engineering in Ouagadougou.
The university, the only western-accredited academic institution
focused solely on water and environmental engineering in Africa, is
training a new generation of engineers to meet the need for
innovation. From its privet hedge-lined, modern campus that exudes
internationalism in a city that is anything but, it grants bachelor’s and
master’s degree programmes to more than 600 students from all over
the continent every year.
For 2ie’s dean, Paul Ginies, Africa’s water shortage needs money to
...We have to
find ways the
community can
adapt to climate
change - and
fast, faster than
the change itself
is happening...
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict, (IRIN) Early Warning, (IRIN) Economy, (IRIN) Education, (IRIN)
Environment, (IRIN) Food Security, (IRIN) Gender Issues, (IRIN) Governance, (IRIN) Health &
Nutrition, (IRIN) Human Rights, (IRIN) Migration, (IRIN) Natural Disasters
[ENDS]
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