| Chapter 1: | Water Resources Development and Management in Sub-Saharan Africa |
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imply that the environment is not important in its own right or as a producer of economic value. Nonetheless, global paradigms and values may be applied too uniformly as the severe poverty and low levels of water resources development found in much of SSA would appear to call for more emphasis, and investment, on supply-side interventions than management projects.
Following the decline in new large dam construction in recent decades, large-scale irrigation projects were increasingly de-emphasized in the 1980s and 1990s as part of changing rural development strategies that increasingly focused on poverty. As donors supported economic reform, integrated rural development projects, public sector agricultural credit, and large irrigation projects were phased out. While the performance of irrigation schemes in SSA has generally been mixed, it was particularly poor for large-scale projects (Inocencio et al., 2007). Small-scale irrigation, including simple traditional systems of water harvesting, has been increasingly promoted as potentially more effective to achieve food security. Farmer-managed irrigation using simple, low-cost methods of water management has been enthusiastically adopted by farmers, nongovernmental organizations, and international agencies, and increasingly by African governments (Carter, 1989; Tafesse, 2003).
Recent Developments and Moving Forward
Interestingly, the policies of important international lenders such as the World Bank appear to be making a shift back toward water development. In the late 1980s and 1990s, several World Bank Operational Directives (OD) focused on environmental concerns and effectively reduced possibilities for water resources development lending. However, the recent Water Resources Sector Strategy of the World Bank (2004) indicates a greater openness to development. Further, former president Wolfowitz, at the World Economic Forum (2006) in Davos, acknowledged a call by African leaders for more infrastructure lending, a sentiment echoed by Maria Mutagamba (World Water Forum, 2006), recent chair of the African Ministers Council for Water, who declared that Africa is currently held