Après un petit pèlerinage ou oumra à la Mecque, Sobel Diouf, informaticien sénégalais à la carrière prometteuse dans le secteur du pétrole, croyait avoir trouvé un nouvel équilibre spirituel. Mais son retour à Dakar via Milan est bouleversé par une rencontre inattendue dans un avion : Mona Saleh, journaliste italo-jordanienne à l’élégance magnétique, au charme voilé et au passé énigmatique. Dans les ruelles animées de Milan, se tisse un lien complexe entre eux, à la croisée de leurs univers. Ce qu’ils pensaient être une simple parenthèse devient une passion dévorante.

Partagé entre ses devoirs familiaux, sa foi et l’attirance irrépressible qu’il éprouve pour Mona, Sobel entreprend un voyage intérieur semé de dilemmes à travers des paysages aussi variés que les dunes sacrées de l’Arabie, les canaux romantiques de l’Italie, les quartiers chics de Dakar et la forêt majestueuse de rôniers et de baobabs de Fandène au Sénégal.

« Masques dévoilés » questionne avec profondeur la frontière fragile entre devoir et liberté, amours passionnés et trahisons intimes, fidélité et pouvoir tentateur de l’argent facile et révèle de façon subtile les secrets enfouis derrière les masques que nous portons tous.

As the coronavirus (COVID-19) spreads through Africa, it is time to make the water crisis a core focus for our political leaders. 

Many African cities have had to take drastic measures in recent years to tackle water shortages. Cape Town’s historic shortage in 2018 is fresh in our minds. South African authorities narrowly avoided disaster by rationing drinking water to 50 liters per inhabitant per day in a city that was used to consuming large volumes of water.

That same year, Bouaké in Côte d’Ivoire received emergency financing of $8.5 million from the World Bank to cope with a serious water shortage. The intervention solved the shortage by building two compact water treatment plants, boring and fitting 20 new wells, rehabilitating 82 hand pumps in the villages connected to the city’s water system, and distributing safe water by water tankers.

Water, sanitation and hygiene central to the COVID-19 crisis

The World Health Organization’s number one recommended protective measure against the coronavirus is to wash hands frequently with soap. Ensuring the availability of safe water for all is clearly vital to keep up the fight against the spread of COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 63% of people in urban areas, representing the main clusters of the virus, find it hard to access basic water services and cannot wash their hands.  An estimated 70% to 80% of the region’s diseases are attributable to poor water quality. Dysentery and cholera, for example, are among the leading causes of infant mortality.

African governments have now put in place rapid response plans to combat the COVID-19 emergency. Yet most of these plans concentrate on the immediate health care response and focus less on improving access to water and sanitation, other than outfitting health centers and other public places with handwashing facilities.

Rapid urbanization calls for sustainable solutions to improve access

The crucial issue of access to safe water is especially important in a region facing rapid urban growth. By 2050, over 1.6 billion Africans will be living in cities and urban slums.  The coming years will see populations doubling in some 100 major cities. Some, such as Lagos in Nigeria, with its 23 million inhabitants today, and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with 12 million, are megalopolises already. The world will also see other pandemics. And climate change will increase the episodes of drought.

Hence it is vital for African governments to put strategies in place, earmark part of their budget, and develop policies to supply water, sanitation, and hygiene services for all their people. A number of solutions are available to them:

• Increase investments in water and sanitation: To meet Sustainable Development Goal 6, Africa will need to invest massively in the water and sanitation sectors over the next 10 years. Some $10-15 billion a year will be needed to supply the entire population with safe drinking water and provide basic sanitation service. Currently, African countries allocate no more than 0.5% of their GDP to the sector and invest only a very small proportion of international assistance in this area.
• Guarantee the financial viability of water utilities: A recent World Bank study on the performance of water supply services in Africa finds that half of the region’s utilities do not have the revenues to cover their operation and maintenance costs. Countries urgently need to build up the operational capacities and resilience of both public and private utilities to be able to supply sufficient volumes of high-quality water. And they need to do this at a politically and socially acceptable tariff while remaining financially viable.
• Re-use wastewater: For many countries, wastewater management has become an important way to meet the demand for water, especially around urban areas where market gardens are being developed and providing vital food supplies to city residents. In Israel for example, 91% of wastewater is treated, and 71% of it is then used to irrigate crops. In African countries, however, just 10% of wastewater is treated. An increase in the reuse of it to irrigate cropland could secure the region’s food security as countries apply circular economy approaches to water security.

Today’s historic health crisis will deal a long-term blow to the global economy, but it will hit the fragile African economies even harder. The faster these economies respond, the more resilient they will become. A sustainable response to COVID-19 and the pandemics that will follow must include a focus on water and sanitation.

Source: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/nasikiliza/covid-19-solving-africas-water-crisis-more-urgent-ever

A public faucet that serves 1,000 families in
el Alto, Bolivia.
Photo credit: Stephan Bachenheimer / World Bank

Small towns* typically have not been well served by national or regional water utilities. Decentralization has become increasingly widely adopted, but even if local governments at the small town level have the power to operate a water utility, they often lack the capital and skills to do so. In response, some local governments and public institutions concentrate improvements on upgrading public utilities’ operations or strengthening community based management. In other cases, they choose to bring in the private sector knowledge of how to get clean water and sanitation services to more people more efficiently, affordably or sustainably. There is no one solution to addressing often very complex water and sanitation challenges. 

There are many ways in which the public sector can leverage its own resources through partnering with the private sector. For the domestic private sector to fully realize its potential at scale in the small town sub-sector, we found they need capable and enabled public institutions to structure the market and regulate private operators.

Lessons learned from case study countries (Colombia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Uganda, Cambodia, Niger and Senegal) in a new global study published by the Water Global Practice’s Water and Sanitation Program suggest the following three key ways to support public institutions  in order to build a conducive business climate for market players in small towns Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS) service delivery:

1. Increase citizen engagement: Involving civil society and other stakeholders in a well-designed and properly resourced dialogue process is crucial to address concerns and raise awareness about private sector participation issues. In Bangladesh, inadequate attention to this issue was found to be detrimental to efforts to improve water services. In contrast, the Government of the Philippines has created a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Center, which acts as a knowledge centre of PPPs. The PPP Center provides various capacity building programs for local government institutions in terms of understanding the concept of PPPs, how to structure, develop and prepare PPP projects, and how to implement and monitor PPP projects.
2. Encourage market development: Opening markets means that national governments delegate responsibility to provide public service provision to local governments who in turn seek support from the private sector to complement their own skills. In Senegal, the government structured the market by creating a national WSS rural asset holding company, or OFOR. OFOR clustered the 1,500 rural piped schemes of the country into five service areas that are then tendered out to private operators. Since 2015, SEOH (a private operator) is providing safe drinking water to 400,000 people in the areas of Notto Diosmone Palmarin and Gorom Lampsar.
3. Mobilize domestic financing: Develop action plans aimed at the local financial institutions to help them understand the WSS business and offer financial products suitable for the WSS sector. In Benin, local commercial banks have committed to support the water sector by providing debt, equity, and various financing instruments to the private operators in small towns to build new water connections. In the Philippines, the most common and preferred type of partnering is Joint Ventures, for which private operators bring private equities and loans.

For more lessons learned on public institutions and PPPs for sustainable WSS services in small towns, read the full study: Private Sector Provision of Water Supply and Sanitation Services in Rural Areas and Small Towns: The Role of the Public Sector.

*Small towns usually have populations between 5,000 and 50,000 inhabitants.,

Source: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/water/3-ways-countries-can-improve-water-supplies-small-towns

L’ingénieur Fadel Ndaw rappelle qu’entre 70 et 80 % des maladies sur le continent sont dues à la mauvaise qualité de l’eau et à l’absence d’installations d’assainissement adéquates.

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Tribune. Ces dernières années, de nombreuses villes africaines ont dû prendre des mesures drastiques pour éviter des pénuries d’eau potable. Nous nous souvenons tous de la pénurie historique subie par la ville du Cap en 2018. Les autorités sud-africaines avaient évité de justesse la catastrophe en rationnant l’eau potable à 50 litres par jour et par habitant, dans une ville habituée jusque-là à des niveaux élevés de consommation.

La même année, la ville de Bouaké, en Côte d’Ivoire, recevait un financement d’urgence de 8,5 millions de dollars de la Banque mondiale pour faire face à une grave pénurie d’eau potable. Cette intervention avait permis de juguler la pénurie grâce à la construction de stations compactes de traitement, l’équipement de nouveaux forages et la réhabilitation de pompes manuelles dans les villages raccordés au réseau de Bouaké, tout en développant la distribution d’eau potable par des camions-citernes.

Alors que la première recommandation de l’Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS) pour se protéger du coronavirus est de se laver les mains fréquemment avec du savon, il est évident que pour lutter de façon durable contre la propagation du Covid-19 et prévenir toutes les pandémies à venir, la disponibilité d’eau potable à proximité immédiate des habitations pour l’ensemble de la population est un impératif.

source : https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2020/05/14/en-afrique-une-riposte-durable-au-coronavirus-ne-peut-occulter-la-question-de-l-eau_6039655_3212.html

A new study was recently carried out by the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) of the World Bank on how to unlock the potential of Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) to improve Water and Sanitation Services in Africa[1]. According to a Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA) report[2], in 2014 52% of all global mobile money deployments were in Sub Saharan Africa and 82% of Africans had access to GSM coverage. Comparatively, only 63% had access to improved water and 32% had access to electricity. This early adoption of mobile-to-web technologies in Africa provides a unique opportunity for the region to bridge the gap between the lack of data and information on existing water and sanitation assets and their current management — a barrier for the extension of the services to the poor.

Additionally, the poorest are lacking adequate platforms to hold their service providers accountable and be heard by decision makers. In analyzing strengths and weaknesses of existing ICT tools in the water and sanitation sector, the study aimed at helping practitioners operationalize ICT usage in their water and sanitation projects.

The study, a global desk review and case studies in seven African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, Benin, Niger and Liberia), provides evidence on how ICTs can be used to leapfrog the water and sanitation sector towards more sustainable service delivery. Among other benefits, ICTs can contribute to strengthening the sustainability of the water and sanitation systems, raising consumers’ voices and improving services to the poor. 

Below are some of the potential benefits of integrating ICTs in water and sanitation projects:

1. Reduces the duration and costs of monitoring and inventory activities. Accurate data and information management systems are a precursor for sound management and decision support systems. ICTs can help make data transfer more efficient, reduce manual data errors, and increase the frequency of monitoring due to relative cost effectiveness. For example, in Liberia the use of FLOW, an open source mapping software, allowed for the mapping of over 10,000 water points in less than six months in 2011 and supported the preparation of a national WASH sector investment plan from 2012 to 2017. In Liberia, a traditional paper based survey would take at least one year with no guarantee on the quality of data collected.
2. Improves efficiency gains of water service providers. ICTs can enable shortened response time, reduce travel distance and maintenance costs, optimize operations (production costs, energy efficiency etc.) and improve quality of service. The establishment of the Senegalaise Des Eaux (SDE) supervision cockpit for urban water supply in Senegal has contributed to increased network efficiency from 69% to 80% within 10 years. In Benin, an ICT based platform (mWater) facilitated access to financing for service providers through documentation of historic data on technical and financial operations permitting financing of investments by local commercial Banks.
3. Improves collection rates of water service providers through ICT based-payment systems. Some of the most common ICTs adopted by utilities are e-payment systems which offer payment facilitation and increased reliability in billing and payment recovery, reduced administrative and payment transaction costs, and improved revenue collection. The Kiamumbi Water Trust (KWT) in Kenya established an M-PESA payment system in December 2010, enabling 550 households to settle their monthly water bills via mobile phone. In the first month, 42% of customers had transitioned to the mobile payment channel, rising to 59% by month four.
4. Ensure better services to the poor. Mobile phones, especially, are particularly well placed to serve the development needs of the poorest and most vulnerable populations. They represent a widespread and relatively low-cost communication option for rapid information transfer and service facilitation whilst eliminating prevalent issues of distance and time. In Kenya, Jisomee Mita is an application that enables water consumers to use a mobile phone to query and receive current water bills, at a frequency of their convenience.
5. Strengthen citizen voice and accountability framework. ICTs can be used to promote public participation and create a system of transparency and accountability. MajiVoice, a platform for communication between citizens and utilities, was successfully tested in Nairobi and enabled complaints rose from 400 to over 4,000 per month and 94% of submitted complaints closed up from 46% in initial months.

[1] From findings of the study on ‘Unlocking the Potential of Information Communications Technology to improve Water and Sanitation Services’ by Mouhamed Fadel Ndaw, Sr. Water and Sanitation Specialist
[2] The synergies between mobile, energy and water access: Africa – GSMA 2014

Source: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/water/5-potential-benefits-integrating-icts-your-water-and-sanitation-projects