Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene November 2018 Vol.13 No.5 | Page 13

Water Supply
It’s this daily reality for people like Omar that drives the
World Bank’s work in Somalia.
I met Omar as part of my trip for a newly-proposed
project which tackles water for agro-pastoral productivity
and resilience. It builds on a pilot intervention which
taught us that if we want to contribute to the resilience of
rural communities in a dry environment, we need to think
about the multiple uses of water. The Somali Water for
Agro-Pastoral Livelihoods Pilot Project (WALP) used a
grant of US$2 million from the State and Peace-Building
Fund (SPF) to help the successful completion of nine
small scale water infrastructure assets. In Somaliland and
Puntland, these structures are serving more than 42,000
people.
Sand Dams and subsurface dams are not new in the Horn
of Africa. The pilot is significant, however, because it is
fully implemented by Somali authorities, from concept to
implementation. The pilot confirmed that with the right
support and the necessary means, Somali authorities can
deliver public services to the often-marginalized rural
population.
We have learned important lessons from the pilot. These
include the importance of using country systems in a post-
conflict setting, the importance of institutions-building
(as we say at the World Bank Water Global Practice “fix
the institutions that fix the pipes”) and how we must
work beyond service provision of water if we want to
contribute to rural resilience.
These are the building blocks for the project my team
is assessing now. Resilience is one of the pillars of the
World Bank Group’s Country Partnership Framework for
Somalia and one of the Bank’s Multi-Donor Trust Fund
the Global Water Security & Sanitation Partnership five
key priorities. This project illustrates why resilience is so
important.
While my time with Omar was brief, the memory of it will
remain with me for life. Water services should improve
Omar and his family’s health and make his livelihoods
more resilient in the face of a changing climate. He should
not have to choose between the two. The Bank’s water
project will make sure that he will not need to.
About the Author
Tesfaye is a Senior Water Supply and Sanitation Specialist
based in the World Bank’s Fragility, Conflict and Violence
Hub in Nairobi, with a focus on Somalia and the Horn of
Africa. He is currently leading a team for the preparation
of a rural resilience project for
Somalia with water as anchor
community infrastructure and a
regional ground water initiative
with IGAD. Tesfaye is an Ethiopian
national with an engineering and
regional development background.
He has worked in the water sector
mostly in Ethiopia and South
Sudan. In 2013-14, He led the move to a programmatic
approach for a big WASH program in Ethiopia together
with several partners. Before, he led two successful water
supply and sanitation projects in South Sudan, part of
emergency response during the Multi Donor Trust fund
period.
FACTS AND FIGURES
• Around 1.2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the
world’s population, live in areas of scarcity. Another
1.6 billion people, or almost one quarter of the
world’s population, face economic water shortage
(where countries lack the necessary infrastructure to
take water from rivers and aquifers). (FAO, 2007)
• Around 700 million people in 43 countries suffer
today from water scarcity. (Global Water Institute,
2013)
• Two thirds of the world’s population currently live
in areas that experience water scarcity for at least one
month a year. (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2016)
• 3.6 billion people worldwide (nearly half the global
population) are already living in potential water-
scarce areas at least one month per year and this
could increase to 4.8–5.7 billion in 2050 (UNESCO,
2018)
• With the existing climate change scenario, by 2030,
water scarcity in some arid and semi-arid places will
displace between 24 million and 700 million people.
(UNCCD).
• A third of the world’s biggest groundwater systems
are already in distress (Richey et al., 2015).
• Nearly half the global population are already living
in potential waterscarce areas at least one month per
year and this could increase to some 4.8–5.7 billion
in 2050. About 73% of the affected people live in
Asia (69% by 2050) (Burek et al., 2016).
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