148 The Future of Water in African Cities
UNEP/GRID-Europe is credited for GIS processing, with key support from the USGS EROS Data Center, Dartmouth Flood Observatory 2008. The source for this data subset is the Dartmouth Flood Observatory, Dartmouth College. The data used to represent the level of flood frequency in the cities’ river catchments is limited by the inputs of the hydrological model used. The data used the definition of hydrological catchments as defined by Strzepek et al., 2011, which presents limitations related to the use of satellite imagery in establishing land elevation and surface water runoff at the urban level that could include the presence of water infrastructure. Economic and Institutional Strength This variable includes institutional cooperation, transparency, efficiency, and the wider economic context needed to enable integration of urban services. Framing a useful set of indicators to illustrate this variable for the 31 cities proved difficult. Relevant information on institutions is fragmented and the realities of political decision making are also difficult to represent with indicators. Under this variable, we looked for city-level indicators that showed the levels of • efficiency as indicated by the sophistication of current management of water and wastewater services (indicators 32, 33, and 34) and planning of current and future urban services (indicators 39, 40, 41, and 42) • transparency of institutional oversight and scrutiny (indicators 36 and 38) for water resources management, and of country-level governance (indicator 44) • cooperation between government institutions and water services providers (indicators 35 and 37) • wider economic context (indicators 43 and 45). Due to data availability, some specific indicators (38, 43, 44, and 45) are given at the national level as there were no equivalent data at the city level, but are assumed to be viable in the large cities under consideration. Sources were varied, ranging from World Bank data to the existence of formal planning documents for each city; therefore, specific planning documents might have been missed if they were not uploaded onto a public site. Some specific cluster indices were used (indicators 44 and 45), which also have their own advantages and limitations (see Appendix 3 for references). Furthermore, the Water Operators Partnership database is self-reported by the utilities, which makes it difficult to validate data.