New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 30

New Water Policy and Practice

In short, the strategy involves the
creation of offices for the administration of
river basins at the level of the whole country. This guidance aims to support accelerated development of the use of catchment
areas for water supply and hydroelectric
capacity. The strategy emphasises that these
governance offices will be established in 47
basins that must be managed appropriately and environmentally sustainably to meet
the needs of the population.

The need to ensure power supply
to the populations also creates a great deal
of pressure to the water resource. We see
today, even if not very rooted in the basic
concepts of development, government policies orienting to the development of mini
hydropower as opposed to large dams,
within an ecological perspective of the
management of basins. According to the
government, all projects for water supply
need to be regulated and provided through
a system of permits and concessions to be
awarded to private entities. In other words,
the privatization of water becomes a reality
in Angola, although it has been stated that
the concessions will be public–private partnerships. “Private entities can join now, because the law already provides the approval
of the regulatory and legal support to private partners,” said the Secretary of State of
the Waters.

In general, Angolan cities are at an
initial stage of implementation of their Master Plans where service demands through
household connections are previewed. The
need for real implementation of the municipal management of services is included in
one of the recommendations of National
Forum on the Water for All program. There
the need for adoption of mechanisms for
coordination between Provincial Directorates for Energy and Water along with the
municipal administrations as the entities
that are responsible for the implementation

of the integrated municipal rural development and combating poverty programs (cit.
ANGOP 3/3/2014) was established.

In the urban areas, the users of municipal services of water are the most interventionist and clamoring for this muchyearned resource, making access to water
in these areas more structured through the
presence of public water companies in each
city. In rural areas, the situation is far more
complicated for average users who need to
walk dozens of kilometers to get water from
rivers. The rural population is poorer and
the literacy rate is too low, implying that
there is almost non-existent knowledge and
ability of the citizens to demand the fulfillment of their constitutional rights.

This fact is associated with socio-cultural aspects that generally allow
common profiling of all the peoples in the
different Angolan regions. It is very important to mention that a woman in this society has an important role within the family,
as a matriarch in the practical sense of the
word, and therefore she runs between various tasks that include providing the subsistence farming, gathering of firewood, water,
caring for the children, and performing all
domestic services.

But access to water is not just an issue
for humans, it is also important for wildlife
and water animals, as members of the environment that we all share. Environmental awareness should be a part of the substantive agendas of all government policies
since the environment and the crosscutting
issues are linked. The policy on quality and
use of water has yet to regulate certain uses
and, above all, to provide the ecological
characterization of all watersheds, enabling
water-use scenarios for each environmental
component.

In the context of these policy measures that are to be implemented in the short
and medium term, all the guidelines of sus28