Africa: Digging into the Water and Food crisis

Groundwater is an integrated component of the natural water cycle and can be found almost anywhere beneath our feet. This hidden source of water is important for drinking, livestock, and irrigation in Africa. Sustainable freshwater sources are critical in fulfilling the sustainable development goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 6 on water.  According to the first quantitative map of groundwater resources in Africa produced by MacDonald et al. (2012) , the volume of groundwater is estimated to be 0.66 million km 3 . To view this number in a more realistic manner, this is 100 times more than annual renewable freshwater resources and 20 times more than the freshwater present in African lakes. However, this gigantic pool of ‘hope’ to Africa has been widely ignored and misunderstood. Falkenmark’s study (1989) on the Water Stress Index only sees a definite measure of water scarcity that is based on the “hydraulic density of population”. This water metric disregards freshwater storage such a...

                                                                                                Teenagers searching for clean water out of their village ( globalcitizen.org ) Before diving into the development actuality and water and food insecurities in Africa, I would like to start this first blog post with a reflection upon Binyavanga Wainaina’s article “How to write about Africa” ( Wainanina, 2019 ) . In Wainaina’s article, he has adopted a rather exaggerated and sarcastic tone to criticize the conceptualizations of Africa in social media and in Western colonial countries’ lenses. Although reading the article is amusing, I felt depressed and frustrated when having a second thought about it. It just makes me wonder, in what positions the West...