Introduction

 Welcome to my Blog on Water and Food in Africa.

Water and food are essential to everyone on the planet. However, despite their necessity not everyone has equal access to them. They are unevenly distributed between people, countries and regions. There are many reasons for such resource disparities both through physical geographies and societal differences. In this blog I hope to look into the relationship between water and food and how and why their availability differs. This blog will specifically be focused on Africa, a vast continent that is incredibly interesting geographically due to its broad range of spatial and temporal scales which I hope to focus on more specifically in later posts.

Access to safe and affordable water is recognised by the UN as a human right as lack of such has a severely detrimental effect on human health and well-being. Like many of us, I am guilty of taking this resource for granted due to its accessibility in the UK. It’s easy to forget that many parts of the world rely on an intermittent or minimal water supply. A WHO report defines ‘basic water supply’ as ‘water from an improved source’ that is readily available. In Sub-Saharan Africa 42% of people don’t have access to a basic water supply and only 56% of city-dwellers have access to piped water. In this blog I hope to expand on the factors that contribute to Africa’s water availability and how it is being managed.

This blog will also look at how the availability and accessibility of water affects food production in Africa. The United Nations SDG 2 aims to end global hunger by 2030. With a rapidly increasing population and subsequently an increasing demand for food this goal may be harder to achieve than first thought.  Although the number of people lacking an adequate food supply has improved in Africa since the 1990's, with some countries successfully achieving MDG targets by 2015, others have made little progress and some have even seen increases in undernourishment.

With the ever growing issue of climate change constantly in mind, I also hope to explore how changing climatic conditions are going to affect water and food in different regions of Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is predicted to be hit the hardest by future variations in the climate which will directly affect food supply given the heavy reliance on rain-fed agriculture.

Thank you for reading my blog, my next posts will be more focused on specific themes and case studies exploring agricultural practices, climate change and more.