WEST AFRICA WATER EXPO: The financial and technical challenges of water management

The West Africa Water Expo will open its doors on July 10, 2019 in Lagos, Nigeria. This exhibition is organised with the aim of promoting the water sector in this region and more generally in Africa, a continent where one third of the population is deprived of drinking water. The West African Water Fair will give participants the opportunity to present the latest products and technologies to potential customers, creating new distribution channels in Nigeria and neighbouring countries. It will also promote meetings between public and private sector investors, decision makers and other stakeholders.

Below are the elements that will fuel the three-day exchanges:

– Increasing water portability to generate more profit;

– Improving integrity of drinking water distribution systems;

– Creation of local content solutions to the challenges of the water sector;

– Financially viable ways to improve access to safe drinking water;

– Deployment of intelligent ICT-based technology in the water sector in Nigeria: the new direction;

– Impact of climate change on water resources development and the need for improved forecasting;

– Impact of public-private partnerships on urban water supply services;

– Financing water distribution in Africa;

– Water scarcity and water conservation: challenges, business opportunities and solutions;

– Improving the integrity of drinking water distribution systems;

– Decentralised wastewater management systems: intelligent and resilient technology for the sub-region;

– Understanding global change and its hydrological impacts;

– Using ICTs to monitor rural water supply and wastewater management services in Nigeria;

– Exploration of water distribution institutions organised by users (cooperatives, special districts, insurance system );

– Engineers improve the profitability of the water industry value chain;

– Development of data collection and distribution systems to improve water resource forecasting and exploitation;

– Ensuring the safety of treated wastewater for reuse as drinking water;

– Equity in existing water-management laws;

– Impact of public-private partnerships on urban water supply services.

Blue gold still unexploited in Africa

A recent study by the National Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF shows that in Nigeria, three out of 10 people do not have access to safe drinking water. Like Nigeria, several African countries are unable to provide full drinking water coverage. A total of 300 million people are deprived of it throughout the continent. Yet Africa has enormous water potential. According to researchers at the Institute of British Geological Studies (BGS), the total volume of aquifers in the African subsoil is 660,000 km3, a figure a hundred times higher than the amount of water that flows to the surface each year, and which represents twenty times the volume of fresh water contained in all African lakes.

Luchelle Feukeng