Water Management
Water governance
Good practices for water use authorisation systems – Lessons from five countries
Across Africa, water permit systems are used as a tool to regulate and control water use. And yet, the implementation of these systems is not without challenges: they are resource intensive, and require regular updating, and compliance monitoring and enforcement. A study on and exchange of experiences by water authorities and researchers in Malawi, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, identified both common challenges and different good practices in relation to the key functions of permit systems.
Across most of Africa, integrated water resources management( IWRM) has been introduced as the gold standard for managing water resources. A key tool in the IWRM toolbox is the use of permits or licences to authorise water use. These permit systems, however, derive, for the most part, from a long colonial history, and despite the changed intentions of post-colonial African governments, they have carried some of the negative colonial intentions with them into the present day.
A study in five countries( Malawi, Kenya, South Africa, Uganqada and Zimbabwe) shows that permit systems were introduced in these countries as far back as 1929 in Kenya, under the Water Ordinance, or 1927 under the Water Act in Zimbabwe.
National water legislation and water permit systems were introduced by the colonial governments to claim ownership of water resources, and to harness them in the interests of the white, colonial minority. Only Uganda escaped the imposition of a water permit system, with use of water being controlled under the land legislation instead.
Africans were excluded from the formal permitting systems, with a gradual but effective erosion of their rights to water over the colonial period, as colonial governments claimed more and more control over water resources to serve the colonial economy.
Since liberation, African governments have revived their water policy and legislation, with very different intentions from those of the colonial governments, focused, more recently, on sustainable and equitable development and poverty eradication. However, despite the laudable policy intentions, in practice, water permit systems risk continuing to serve as tools of dispossession and exclusion for large numbers of small-scale water users in rural areas who cannot all be reached individually by under-resources government agencies. The challenge is to
20 Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • July- August 2017