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ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND WATERIntegrated urban water frameworks foremerging cities in sub-Saharan AfricaKala Vairavamoorthy, Seneshaw Tsegaye and Jochen Eckart,Patel College of Global Sustainability, University of South Florida, USAIt is widely accepted that one of the major challenges of thetwenty-first century is to provide safe drinking water andbasic sanitation for all. Presently, more than 1 billion peoplelack access to improved water sources, and over 2.6 billionpeople lack access to basic sanitation – and nearly all of thesepeople live in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, watersupply coverage is around 61 per cent and access to improvedsanitation around 30 per cent. 1Providing adequate water supply and sanitation, particularly inurban areas, is a challenging task for governments throughout theworld. Already, half of the world’s population lives in cities, mostof which have inadequate infrastructure and resources to addresswater and wastewater management in an efficient and sustainableway. This task is made even more difficult due to predicteddramatic global changes. For example, climate change is predictedCurrent and future population in African cities exposed to droughtSource: World Bank, 2012to cause significant changes in precipitation patternsand their variability, affecting the availability of water;technological and financial constraints present challengesin maintaining and upgrading infrastructureassets to deliver water to all sectors while maintainingthe quality of water distributed to the various users;and population growth, urbanization and industrialactivities are leading to a dramatic increase in waterconsumption and wastewater discharge.Under the aforementioned circumstances, currentmodels of urban water management and their correspondinginfrastructure have already failed or areon the verge of collapse from the perspective of costeffectiveness, performance and sustainability. Hence,urbanizing areas are now faced with difficult futurestrategic decisions – do they continue business asusual following a conventional technical, institutionaland economic approach for water and sanitation? Ordo they look for a new paradigm?Sub-Saharan Africa is urbanizing faster than any othercontinent, and most of this urbanization is taking placein emerging towns and villages. 2 These areas have aunique, but fleeting opportunity to change the way theythink about water and how they develop their infrastructure.Further, these emerging urban areas often do nothave mature infrastructure and governance structures.These conditions create an opportunity to implementradically different urban water systems based on thekey principles of integrated urban water management(IUWM). IUWM principles include: resilience of urbanwater systems to global change pressures; interventionsover the entire urban water cycle; reconsideration of theway water is used (and reused); and greater applicationof natural systems for water and wastewater treatment.Critical to the implementation of IUWM principles isthe early and continuous integration of all stakeholdersin the decision-making and implementation process.Furthermore, institutional and governance changes arerequired to promote a more integrated approach tourban water management. Current trends suggest thatfuture water systems will shift from being linear (openloop) centralized systems to closed loop, semi-centralizedsystems that maximize opportunities for waterreuse and recycling, and the generation of energy andnutrients from used water.[ 279 ]