Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa water, Sanitation May-June2015 Vol. 10 No.3 | Page 28

Water Supply

Prepaid Meters Scupper Gains Made in
Accessing Water in Africa
organisations are against the idea
of prepaid water meters.
“If one has to pay upfront before
accessing water, then it would
mean those in most need would
be denied access,” Mutsvanga
said, adding that water is a global
human right.
Mutsvanga was echoing the
United Nations General Assembly
which, in July 2010, emerged
with a binding resolution on
the human right to water and
sanitation – but for Africa, the
human right to water may be far
from reality.
Laden with a population of
approximately 1.1 billion, Africa’s
Whether they like it or not, many Africans faced with the possibility of having to access water through prepaid 300 million people have no access
meters have resorted to unprotected and often unclean sources of water because they cannot afford to pay. to safe drinking water, according
Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS to the U.N. Environment
Programme (UNEP).
By Jeffrey Moyo
Many rights activists on the continent attribute Africa’s
mounting water challenges partly to the advent of prepaid
water meters.
While many countries appear to have met the U.N.
“We already have hundreds of millions of people without
Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the
access to clean water, and imagine the severity of the wat \