CHAPTER 3
Assessing Water Management Challenges and Capacities in African Cities African cities face a myriad of challenges in providing water to their residents. The integrated urban water management (IUWM) options presented in Chapter 2 of this book can be part of a solution, but applying them will take time, money, knowledge, and above all the institutional capacity to make decisions that cross-cut sectors. Policy making across sectors will require cooperation and dialogue between responsible administrators and all stakeholders. Some African cities are well placed to implement changes, and others will need to build capacity to work more effectively. The nature of the challenges also varies widely depending on geographic, demographic, and economic conditions. This book attempts to unravel some of this complexity by conducting a survey of urban administrators; closely examining the available data on 31 representative African cities to create an index of water management challenges and capacities and a database of key indicators; creating future urban extent maps for these cities; and using climate change projections at the basin scale to project possible climate change effects on the 31 cities. As with other city databases, the quality of available city-level data used for this analysis was far from optimal. The gaps and limitations of the data available from public sources and the lack of regular monitoring represent serious hindrances to the understanding of current and future needs and to the ability to plan for meeting these needs. There 63