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FIRST
ROUND
TABLE CONFERENCE
Geneva,
10 – 11 December
This
document has been prepared by the Southern African Development
Community (SADC) for the Round Table Conference (RTC) on
"Integrated Water Resources Development and Management in
the Southern African Development Community".
The purpose of the document is to explore opportunities
for policy dialogue, consensus-building and resource
mobilisation between SADC and its co-operating partners.
The theme was chosen by SADC because of the increasing
recognition that effective stewardship of the region's water
resources will play an important role in helping member-states
achieve SADC's key development objectives that include poverty
alleviation, food security and industrial development.
Likewise, the large number of shared water bodies among
member-states clearly demonstrates that commonly agreed
approaches and solutions must be found for water resources if
SADC is to attain its goal of an "integrated regional
economy on the basis of balance, equity and mutual benefit.”
By
any measure, the challenge of developing and managing the
region's water sector is daunting.
Problems and characteristics of the sector include:
-
extreme
temporal and spatial rainfall variability, often
triggering severe drought and occasional flooding;
-
rapidly
growing and urbanising populations, leading to increasing
water scarcity and water pollution;
-
minimal
coverage of water and sanitation services among the urban
and rural poor, and thus a high incidence of water-borne
diseases and other illnesses related to inadequate
sanitation;
-
heavy
dependence on extensive agriculture, with generally very
low water-use efficiency;
-
degraded
watersheds and deteriorating water quality;
-
numerous transboundary river
basins, with complex international water rights issues;
and
-
the growing importance of
hydropower with equally significant transboundary
implications.
Given
these challenges, this document seeks to highlight how SADC is
approaching the development and management of its water
resources and to identify areas where further assistance from
the international donor community is being sought to advance
and consolidate efforts currently under way.
Towards this end, the next section of the document
provides an overview and some of the characteristics of the
water sector in SADC's development efforts.
The third section then briefly traces the evolution of
SADC's water policy and looks at the emerging policy consensus
now set by SADC for the water sector. The fourth section highlights ongoing efforts at regional
co-operation for water resources development, followed by the
fifth section which pinpoints some of the constraints
affecting SADC's capability to achieve more sustainable and
cost effective water resources development.
The sixth section of the document then turns to an
overview of the recently endorsed SADC Regional Strategic
Action Plan for water resources development and management,
covering the years 1999-2004.
This Action Plan was approved by the last SADC Council
of Ministers meeting held in Port Louis, Mauritius, September
1998. Emerging from the Action Plan, the last section presents
an overview and rationale for the areas of support requested
for consideration by the Round Table Conference participant
organisations.
Before
proceeding, three points should be emphasised.
First, this document is concerned only with water
resource issues of a regional character or with transboundary
implications. These are defined by SADC to mean issues or
challenges affecting two or more member-countries. Each member-state clearly has water sector projects or
institutional issues that are strictly national in focus, but
which, by this definition, fall outside the scope of this
document and the purview of this RTC.
Such national projects would thus be examined under
other funding mechanisms, such as national Consultative Group
or Round Table meetings, or bilaterally with interested
development partners.
Second,
the concerns of the two newest SADC members - the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Seychelles, which joined in September
1997 - have not been included in the Regional Strategic Action
Plan or this RTC document.
This is because their membership came into effect only
after most of the background technical material had been
gathered and synthesised for the Strategic Action Plan.
It is, nonetheless, expected that the regional
activities identified within this RTC framework will prove
equally valuable to SADC's two newest member-states.
Third,
it is important to underscore the fact that the RTC, for which
this document is prepared,
represents the first time that SADC has approached the
donor community using the Round Table Conference mechanism to
seek assistance for one of its priority sectors. Until now, donor support for SADC activities had been
obtained either in a bilateral or multi-sectoral manner, which
occasionally resulted in less than optimal use of available
resources. This RTC, on a single sectoral issue, is,
therefore, a learning process for all concerned parties. The
goal of the RTC is to improve the effective deployment of
resources from both SADC and the international donor community
by focusing on a single, albeit complex sector, and to
minimise confusion or misunderstandings about where and how
available resources are allocated.
See
Annex 1 for map of SADC member states.
II
The
Role and Importance of Water Resources for SADC's Sustainable Development
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