2. Water Scarcity and Famine in East Africa

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 been perfunctorily utilized and integrated into conventional literature without empirical grounds (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017). The WSI utilizes mean annual river flows as an approximation of renewable freshwater resources, which fails to accurately account for variability in the hydrological cycle, other source of renewable water such as groundwater stores, as well as the socio-economic distribution and factors contributing to adaptive capacity (Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017). These omissions are critical in the context of Africa given that only 5% of cultivated land is equipped for irrigation (Siebert et al., 2010) and the majority of Africans reside in or are dependent on agrarian and rural environments that are immensely susceptible to climatic variations (Cheru, 2008). 

Therefore, additional dimensions need to be incorporated into our view of water scarcity. A crucial dimension to consider is adaptive capacity, the ability for a society to adapt to stress, which is approximated using potential infrastructure development and irrigation productivity (Molden et al., 2007). Adaptive capacity can then be incorporated to define economic water scarcity: where renewable water resources are sufficient but lacking in availability due to inadequate investments in infrastructure (Rijsberman, 2006).

Figure 2 illustrates this perspective of water scarcity.

Figure 2: Physical water scarcity, current economic water scarcity, and potential economical water scarcity in Africa (International Water Management Institute, n.d., cited in Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017).

In conjunction with economic water scarcity, rising temperatures have led to a 34% decline in Africa’s agricultural productivity growth since 1961 (WMO, 2022).

These factors, alongside increasingly longer droughts, inconsistent precipitation, conflict-induced inflation and displacement have resulted in famine for more than 23 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia in East Africa (Abbonizio and Symington, 2023). Although families traditionally had the capacity to draw on their food reserves or rely on selling precious livestock to tide them through short term droughts (McFadden, 2022), the culmination of the above factors have overwhelmed individual and national capacities to provide food security (Abbonizio and Symington, 2023). 

While international humanitarian organizations such as the World Food Programme (WFP) have been able to assist, such measures can only be short-term. Funding for such organizations often fluctuate and decline in more challenging global economic environments. For example, funding shortfalls have reduced the WFP’s ability to provide food assistance to three million people in Somalia between December 2022 and July 2023 (Abbonizio and Symington, 2023). Evidently, significant investment in water and food security infrastructure, alongside conflict resolution mechanisms, are necessary in order to address famines in a more independent, consistent, and comprehensive manner.