70 The Future of Water in African Cities
have a smaller challenge for the future than a city with a low rate of WSS coverage, even if achieving that high rate of coverage might have been very challenging in the past. Cities that face relatively strong challenges and have relatively high capacity are candidates for early consideration of IUWM. Cities with higher challenges are likely to have greater need of an emphasis on water fit for purpose, security through a diversity of sources, and wastewater as a valuable resource. At the same time, linking aspects of planning across sectors and spatial scales and involving all stakeholders will demand more institutional capacity. For each specific case, an assessment of the value of each approach should be made. Although the challenges of secondary cities might be at least as great as those for large and capital cities, unfortunately not enough data was available to allow us to make a similar overview for secondary cities.
You Cannot Manage What You Do Not Measure: A City Dashboard as a Starting Point for Dialogue Urban water management challenges are complex, and capacities at the city level are hard to isolate. City-level information is typically available in city-specific documents and only to a limited extent in global or regional databases.3 Furthermore, even when information is available, there are no agreed standards (such as International Organization for Standardization standards) for reporting, so seemingly similar data might be defined differently. Finally, much of the required information is only available at the national or regional level (for example, economic production and income data) or for urban areas (for example, Joint Monitoring Program data and other household survey–based data). Such information is difficult to compare across cities. To make information available that is comparable and city based as far as possible, we have developed a dashboard with pertinent information for each of the 31 large African cities (for methodology, see Appendixes 2 and 3). This provides a starting point for a review of complex challenges and capacities, and in the longer run a starting point for a cities database for African cities, similar to the Global City Indicators Program.4 The dashboard illustrates the water management challenges, as well as indicators for capacity for good water management practices, for each city relative to other cities (see Figure 3.5). Indicators for challenges focus on water scarcity, urban population growth, water and sanitation services access, flood risk, and solid waste management at the city level. Indicators