Introduction: Water and Politics of the Nile Basin
Welcome to my blog on the politics of water access within Africa. In this introductory post I will reflect on the current access to water and introduce my specific case study that I will expand on in further blogs. I am focusing on the overlap of politics and water because in Africa one of the main problems lies in the management of water sources, combined with declining per capita freshwater sources ( Oyebande, 2001 ). With Africa being the second largest continent, there are large variations in rainfall continentally. Most of the rain that Africa receives is within the tropics, however the unpredictable and changing trends in precipitation events, means that attaining water security is becoming more difficult. There also lies difficulty in capturing the rainfall from these events and then managing and storing it so that there is access to safe and potable water. On a continental scale only 15% of Africa’s population have access to safely managed drinking water and 82% of people don...