ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY
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water used by the region’s estimated 280 million people comes
from a transboundary source.
Transboundary aquifers and river basins have become sites of
major activity in the SADC water sector. A lot of the focus remains
on finding smart ways of managing the two water resources to
assist communities in fending off the real and devastating effects
of climate change on their livelihoods, economies, and general
well-being.
The role groundwater can play in blunting the effects of climate
change and natural disasters is most obvious during severe
droughts, or when infrastructure failures occur or concerns about
water quality are raised.
GROUNDWATER A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
During times of severe water scarcity, groundwater can be more
than a helpful resource — it can be the difference between life
and death.
Dr Imtiaz Sooliman heads up Gift of The Givers, a humanitarian
organisation that has led many drought-relief efforts across the
SADC region. He says sometimes the help comes just in time, as
communities stand on the edge of a precipice.
In the university town of Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) in South
Africa’s Eastern Cape province, a combination of drought and failing
infrastructure have caused taps to dry up and compromised the area’s
water quality.
Sooliman says if they had not intervened and successfully drilled
boreholes, the situation would have had a tragic ending. “The
people would have died. There is no other way of putting it. There
is no other form of water there.”
Sooliman says residents say the boreholes averted chaos from
erupting in Makhanda — tensions were high, municipal buildings
were on the verge of being torched by desperate residents, and the
usually idyllic town was close to complete social breakdown.*
PROJECTS AND STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
Sauramba, looking further into the future, says the mushrooming
transboundary water management projects are a source of
encouragement about prospects of development in the region.
The Shire ConWat Project, which looks at the transboundary water
resources in Malawi and Mozambique, is a 10-month-long project
focusing on managing water use from the Shire River Basin and
Shire Valley Aquifer and has only one month left before completion.
Another project, in collaboration with the International Water
Management Institute, started in October 2018 and is set to last
three years, focusing on the Tuli-Karoo Transboundary Aquifer
shared by Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
June 2019 Volume 25 I Number 4