“True sustainability in Africa requires more than policy reform—it requires a transformation in how humans understand their relationship with the earth.” ~ Ikechukwu Alamezie, faculty professor at Pan-African University in Lagos, Nigeria
The colonization and commercialization of water in Africa bridges the history of infrastructure control with modern-day resource extraction by foreign corporations, financial institutions, and regional nation-states.
In his must-read 1972 book, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” Dr. Walter Rodney argued that European colonialism did nothing to modernize African infrastructure.
Instead, it designed public works—including water and sanitation— strictly to serve European administrative outpost, military garrisons, and White settler minorities. Colonialism left the vast majority of rural and urban African populations without basic utilities.
According to Dr. Rodney, this history of deliberate underdevelopment, colonial budgets prioritized railways, ports, and administrative machinery designed to extract raw materials and ship them to Europe. Social services, public health, clean water supplies, and sewage disposal for African communities were chronically underfunded or, in fact, ignored.
Ikechukwu Alamezie writes in his 2026 study called “Colonial Continuities of Reinseparable from the colonial history of extraction, which transformed both people and land into instruments of accumulation.”
Alamerzie, a faculty professor at Pan-African University in Lagos, Nigeria, explains that Africa’s malignancy continues not only because “resource exploitation persists, but that it is legitimized by inherited (Western) worldviews that defi ne nature as property and progress as accumulation.”
In his study, he also notes, “By viewing land and nature as resources of no intrinsic value, colonial powers justifi ed the conversion of ecosystems into commodities.”
The result of years of this colonial exploitation by the West is vast.
According to the Center for Strategic Studies (CSIS) January 2026 report, titled: “Securing Africa’s Water Needs: Generating Resilience through Infrastructure, Investment, Information & Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa,” unsafe water and insuffi cient sanitation anually claims over one million African deaths.
“The African Union estimates the countries of sub-Saharan Africa lose a crushing five percent of the GDP annually due to scarce or contaminated water supplies or poor sanitation,” the report notes.
CSIS argued that Africa’s water systems are in crisis. “From the Sahel to South Africa, 845 million people lack safely managed drinking water, and over 900 million do not have access to safely managed sanitation service(s),” its report notes. The center also notes that the “future of the region depends on solving its water resource challenges.”
Other studies on the challenges to Africa’s water systems and safety have come to similar conclusions.
continues to increase because of several factors, including “climate change, water pollution, deforestation, poor water management, limited water resources, and confl ict.” Other factors include decaying colonial-era water and sanitation systems and infrastructure that increasingly plague urban Africa.
Safe, accessible water sources are key to sustaining human well-being and socioeconomic development. A United Nations study ranked every Sub-Saharan African country as “water insecure to critically insecure.”
According to Greenpeace, nearly two-thirds of Africa is arid or semi-arid, despite the continent holding nearly 9% of global freshwater resources. This is largely because these resources are unevenly distributed: only six countries hold 54% of the continent’s supply, while 27 countries facing severe water poverty share only 7%.
“As a result, more than half of the population in Sub- Saharan Africa lack access to safe drinking water, and an estimated 160 million people across the continent live under water scarcity conditions,” Greenpeace noted.
The water emergency is largely cli-mate-induced. Although Africa contributes less than 4% of global carbon emissions, it faces some of the world’s harshest climate change impacts driven by historic and ongoing fossil fuel consumption in industrialized nations like the United States and European countries.
These climate-induced catastrophes, which highlight the lack of climateproofed water systems, with extreme rainfall as a key factor, pose a severe threat to water supply, “risking infrastructural damage, increasing pollution challenge to Africa’s water security is water pollution.
“Water systems become polluted in many ways, such as when plastics, industrial waste, or untreated sewage drain into water systems, fertilizers and pesticides are flushed into waterways during heavy rains, or due to fossil fuel extraction.”
Among the many examples is South Africa with its coal plants, which “heavily rely on water for many uses, including extraction, preparation, incineration, dust control, and disposal of by-products.”
CSIS mentions five key intersecting factors driving the mounting challenges to water security in Sub-Saharan Africa. They include growing populations, rising water demands, shifting water availability, increasing water-related disasters, and worsening pollution.
To overcome its water crises, CSIS offers three key capacities that must be strengthened.
1) Absorptive: This includes preventive measures to mitigate and withstand stress on water systems, such as sudden floods and droughts.
2) Adaptive: Creating diverse capabilities for evolving demands and long-term threats like climate change and pollution.
3) Enabling: Facilitate decisionmaking processes capable of understanding and addressing risks through collective deliberation and engagement.
Follow Jehron Muhammad @Africawatchfcn on X
