An Economic Geographer’s Journey to Understanding Water and Food in Africa

In this post, I build upon the previous analysis of water scarcity and famine through a case study of community-based water development and management in Cameroon. I begin with a broad overview of the Energy-Water-Food Nexus relationship before zooming into a case study of Kumbo in North-West Cameroon. I then progressively zoom out, analyzing performance indicators of five community water supply networks across Cameroon, before finally evaluating a global-scale review of success factors in rural community water supply management. There is an intricate link between water, food, and energy security ( Smajgl et al. , 2016 ). All three are deeply interconnected in that each resource intricately affects consumption of the others ( Hadian and Madani, 2013 ; Bryan et al. , 2015 ; Hafeez et al. , 2020 ) as illustrated in the Energy-Water-Food Nexus in Figure 1.  Figure 1: Energy-Water-Food Nexus  ( Smajgl et al. , 2016 ) . Water is fundamental to the Energy-Water-Food Nexus and ...

In this post, I build upon the previous overview through an analysis of water scarcity and famine in East Africa. In defining scarcity, one of the most commonly utilized metrics is Falkenmark’s water stress index (WSI) ( Falkenmark et al. , 1989 ). The metric originally measured water scarcity based on the number of people sharing a standard one million cubic meter unit of water per year, with the thresholds for ‘water stress’ and ‘water scarcity’ at 600 and 1000 respectively ( Falkenmark  et al. , 1989 ).  Figure 1 illustrates this definition of water stress and scarcity applied to Africa. Figure 1: Water scarcity across Africa on the basis of the water stress index. The thresholds for water stress and water scarcity are <1700  cubic m/capita/year and <1000 cubic m/capita/year  respectively ( FAO AQUASTAT, 2014 cited in Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017 ). However, these thresholds were context-specific to an industrialized semi-arid country (Israel) and have since b...