During May 2020, the annual African Utility Week and POWERGEN Africa delivered a very successful virtual event with five days of industry leading content and world-class speakers. The water-focused, live webinar focused on “WASH as a first line of defence against COVID-19: Unpacking the African water sector response.”
The moderator was Paul Yillia, Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria: “The current global public health crisis has Africa’s water service providers, especially in cities and big towns, facing some additional new challenges on how the pandemic will impact fresh water management as a whole, but also how it could affect sanitation facilities in service provision.”
Partnerships strengthened by pandemic
“There is a huge demand on the water sector as the first line of defence to make clean water available as a key part of the containment strategy,” said Dhesigen Naidoo, CEO of South Africa’s Water Research Commission, “and it has put huge pressure on the water sector and pushed us beyond our usual capacities. I am happy to say that in most parts of the world, including my own country, the water sector has delivered. So kudos to all of our water engineers, water technicians, our water community all over this continent.”
Can water transmit COVID-19?
“The confirmed potential transmission routes of COVID-19 of respiratory and contact are well understood, but there are additional concerns that aerosol droplets are also a possible route of transmission” stated Prof Feleke Zewge Beshah, Associate Professor of Environmental Chemistry/Engineering at the Addis Ababa University, adding that research from the Netherlands, China, USA and Australia, indicate that the virus may persist for some time in water, feces, sweat and on surfaces, but that it cannot replicate in a water environment outside a host’s tissue.
Water utilities’ resilience
Rose Kaggwa, Director Business and Scientific Services at Uganda’s National Water and Sewerage Corporation said: “What has emerged clearly is the issue of partnerships and strong relationships with key stakeholders and this varies from country to country between municipalities and utilities. We have found that there is a need for a very strong working relationships, also with the private sector.”
Pandemic’s impact on sector funding by donors
According to David Onyango, former MD of the Kisumu Water and Sewerage Company and currently a consultant for the African Development Bank: “Africa’s GDP is expected to fall by about 4.5% and we are expecting the first recession in 25 years. It is expected that the squeeze now will affect the scale of support to the aid programmes and more resources will be directed towards the health sector to deal with the pandemic.”
To view the full webinar, go to www.african-utility-week.com
