Sub-Saharan Africa has an abundance of natural resources, but centuries of exploitation by foreign and local entities have left people without the ability or resources to manage their affairs—including access to water. Sustainable solutions to the challenge require grassroots ownership and involvement.

Sustainable Development Goal 6 aims for Clean Water and Sanitation for All by 2030. The data shows some improvement since 2015, when SDG 6 was established, but the progress is insufficient to meet the 2030 timeframe.

According to UN-Water, only 31% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa has access to safely managed drinking water services, while only 24% has access to adequate sanitation, and just 23% has basic hygiene facilities. The consequences of this reality are dire: poor water access contributes to the spread of disease, malnutrition, economic stagnation, and even gender inequality.

If progress continues at this slow rate, the interconnected health and economic impacts will create a devastating cycle. Unsafe water use will accelerate the spread of waterborne diseases, leading to higher child mortality, worsening malnutrition, and straining healthcare systems, all while reducing productivity. Simultaneously, food insecurity, economic instability, gender inequality, and environmental degradation will intensify as water scarcity drives conflict, overexploitation, and a worsening cycle of depletion.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s water crisis isn’t primarily about physical water scarcity — where water sources are overexploited and no longer serve the population — but rather economic water scarcity. This refers to insufficient water collection and distribution infrastructure, limited financial resources for system maintenance, weak governance structures, and inadequate technical capacity for water management.

The pitfalls of externally driven solutions

Despite receiving nearly 30% of global water-related aid, progress in this area remains insufficient. Some of the reasons for this include:

• Misalignment of donor funds: Many water projects fail because they are not aligned with national water plans. Corruption and lack of political will exacerbate the problem, leading to misallocated funds and ineffective implementation.
• One-size-fits-all approaches: External organisations often impose pre-packaged solutions due to institutional pressures to demonstrate quick, measurable results. These top-down interventions frequently overlook the nuances of local contexts, leading to unsustainable systems that create dependency rather than empowerment.
• Lack of local expertise and maintenance capacity: Large corporations often install water infrastructure without training and resourcing local communities to maintain it. As a result, systems break down over time. In 2024 alone, ForAfrika rehabilitated 101 boreholes that had fallen into disuse due to lack of local maintenance capacity. These boreholes were originally installed by various organizations and municipal authorities over the years.

The power of community-led initiatives

There is ample evidence to show that when communities are involved in the design and implementation of water infrastructure projects, the result is long term sustainability.

In Ethiopia’s Amhara region, for example, the Community-Led Accelerated Water Sanitation and Hygiene (COWASH) project, implemented from 2011 to 2019, demonstrated remarkable success. The project, which emphasised community ownership and local skills development, achieved a 94% functionality rate for water points after five years, compared to the national average of 45%. Key to this success was the formation of local WASH committees that collected user fees, managed maintenance, and ensured community participation in decision-making.

Similarly, the Sustainable Water and Sanitation in Africa (SUWASA) project in Kenya demonstrates the power of combining community leadership with professional management. From 2015-2020, local water user associations were transformed into professional service providers while maintaining community oversight. The result? Non-revenue water (water that is “lost” for example through leakage, before it reaches the customer) was reduced from 65% to 35%, while service coverage increased from 45% to 76%.