Water reform in Africa: buying a maternity dress for a woman who is not yet pregnant

摘要

In a consultative workshop of the newly established Mazowe Catchment Council in Zimbabwe, villagers commented on the new Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) concepts such as basin-level 'water allocation': 'We are wasting time discussing what should happen tomorrow when we have nothing now and are unlikely to see these plans materializing. This is like buying a maternity dress for a woman who is not yet pregnant. You should build dams in rural areas first before you can talk about water allocation' (Chikozho and Latham, 2005). This illustrates, in a nutshell, how informal, largely agrarian water users without even minimal access to infrastructure for domestic and productive water uses perceive the new water reform as introduced in Zimbabwe and many other African countries since the 1990s. While these reforms, under the banner of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), may at least partially work in the formal water economy, they fail to match the informal sector of the majority of small-scale water users in rural Africa.