Sharing waters, transforming futures: CIWA's action for a climate-resilient Africa

Last year, schoolteacher Aishatu Bunu fled her home in Maiduguri, Nigeria when heavy rainfall brought floodwaters that devastated her community. “We saw water coming,” says Bunu, who waded through chest-high water with her three children to find temporary shelter in a gas station. Her family ate only peanuts during the ordeal, and she feared they wouldn’t survive. The flooding forced nearly one million people to flee their homes in West and Central Africa.

Increased variability in the Earth’s water cycle is also damaging farming in Morogoro, Tanzania. “Rain has been very scarce,” community member Absalom David Kinyonga says. “The crops didn’t grow as well as expected, and rivers dried up," severely diminishing crop yields and water availability.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, where over 90% of surface water crosses national boundaries, no country can secure its water future alone. When the Zambezi River floods in Zambia, families in Mozambique lose their homes. When Lake Victoria’s levels drop in Uganda, fisher people in Tanzania and Kenya lose their livelihoods.  

Climate shocks also cause pollution, migration, biodiversity degradation, and economic loss. To reverse these trends and improve economies, incomes,  and people’s well-being, countries must jointly manage and cooperate over their shared water resources.    

The World Bank’s Cooperation in International Waters in Africa (CIWA) helps countries and regional institutions do just that. 

CIWA supports countries to collect and share their water data, collaborate on technical and institutional capacity building, and prioritize optimized joint investments with regional benefits and shared costs.

How countries choose to cooperate over transboundary waters today will determine the region’s resilience for generations. That is why CIWA recently conducted an assessment to evaluate the climate resilience and mitigation benefits of its activities since its inception in 2011.

Supporting resilient infrastructure investment

The report’s analysis of 41 operations and programs found that CIWA has a critical niche where climate action and development intersect. CIWA strengthens the capacity of regional water institutions to inform and convene stakeholders and facilitates cooperation on water resources management and investment planning. It develops flood and drought monitoring, fills data gaps, supports regional water agreements and institutions, and improves watershed management and development planning.

The report found that CIWA support has unlocked key infrastructure investments with regional benefits. The main mechanism through which CIWA contributes to greenhouse gas mitigation is its influence on six major hydropower investments, four of which have been mobilized and two of which have potential to be mobilized. The mobilized hydropower investments can mitigate 23,770 kilotons of carbon dioxide equivalent relative to fossil fuels and produce an average of 25,000 gigawatt-hours of energy per year. The calculation is based on data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

On a smaller scale, multiple CIWA operations also contribute to greenhouse gas mitigation through installation of solar-powered pumps for groundwater use.

Filling in critical data gaps 

The lack of localized hydro-meteorological data can present a major barrier to resilient water resources management policy formulation and implementation. To address the challenges of rising temperatures and water scarcity, governments and regional water organizations need data-driven decisions to inform cooperative transboundary water management. CIWA supports closing data gaps and provides tools to use that data for planning and decision making.  Through 2024, CIWA supported the Water Data Revolution: Closing the Data Gap for Transboundary Water in Africa initiative to connect African decision-makers with demand-driven, accessible data tools. This transformative program helped to revolutionize the way water data is collected, shared, and used by strengthening regional information systems, promoting open access/public domain and harmonized standards, and equipping countries to make smarter, more resilient decisions for managing shared water resources. As a key example, we developed online dashboards for water accounting that harness open-access data to support real-time analysis—turning information into actionable insights and bridging the gap between data and decisions.

Fueling cooperation on a regional level

While some water services in Africa are necessarily very local, such as farmer-led irrigation development, others, such as developing flood and drought early-warning systems and addressing water pollution, require a regional approach. 

In addition, institutions must deliver water management services at the regional level. CIWA creates opportunities for regional cooperation by bringing together stakeholders to strengthen technical capacity; supporting internship and young professional programs; providing opportunities for knowledge exchanges with water staff in other countries; and convening members of civil society, technical experts, and technicians in basin-wide fora. It also collaborates with Equal Aqua, a World Bank platform to empower institutions with data and knowledge to increase opportunities for women in water sector jobs, and the Stockholm International Water Institute to improve the enabling environment for female water professionals in Africa and incentivize institutions to increase the number of women in technical and leadership positions. 

In regions highly prone to conflict, extreme water shocks, and natural disasters, watershed management and planning are key opportunities to embed mechanisms for resilience into peace-making efforts. It’s more than wishful thinking. With the support of CIWA, the Lake Chad Development and Climate Resilience Action Plan and the Niger Basin Climate Resilience Investment Plan identified regional development actions to strengthen social cohesion and water security.

Through all these efforts, CIWA is moving the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa one step closer to becoming more resilient to the ravages of climate change.