Water awareness campaign launched

The Sana’a Basin Water Management Project (SBWMP), a Yemeni government initiative, launched its first Information and Public Awareness Campaign (IPAC) with a recent four-day workshop. "People are aware of the problem but not of the solution: they do not understand what their responsibility is,” Dr Abdallah Azzalab, a campaign organiser, told IRIN, in the Yemeni capital, Sana'a. Azzalab added that the objective of the campaign, funded by the World Bank, was to make water providers and users aware of the real cost of water to society and to promote community participation in water resources management in one of the world’s most water-scarce countries. Yemen’s per capita share of recoverable water sources is just 137 cu. m, according to the most recent statistics from 2000, having dropped from 242 cu. m in 1980. This is compared with an average of 1,250 cu m in the Middle East and 7,500 cu. m in the world. The country's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSB) states that these figures “place Yemen on the bottom of the ladder of nations that are under the water poverty line”. Annual water useage in Yemen is about one and a half times the rate of recharge and in Sana’a Basin, the rate is even higher. Until 1962, agriculture in the Sana’a Basin, a central highland area of about 3,200 sq km, depended on dry farming practices and rain-fed irrigation. But since the 1970s the Tawilah aquifer was discovered and drilled boreholes tapped groundwater for irrigation. Moreover, the population has more than doubled: today the basin is home to about 1.8 million people, 1.5 million of whom live in Sana’a City, the nation’s capital, which has an annual growth rate of 7 percent. As surface water and rechargeable aquifers fail to provide enough water for both domestic use and agriculture, which accounts for 90 percent of water consumption, wells are being drilled up to a depth of 1,000 metres. One water expert told IRIN that water was literally being “mined” from aquifers which cannot be recharged and the water table of Sana’a Basin is dropping by 4 to 8 metres per year. Complete exhaustion of the natural water resources of the capital and its surrounding rural areas threatens within 20 years if current patterns of consumption continue unabated. As the PRSB notes, there has been an emphasis in Yemen on improving the supply of water, rather than its usage, both at government level and also in the private and domestic sectors. A key component of the SBWMP is to change and improve habits of consumption through popular participation and to this end an information and public awareness campaign has been launched due to ignorance and a lack of education on water issues. In a study conducted by the SBWMP in 2002 to evaluate the public level of awareness, it was found that most people believed diminishing rainfall was a punishment from God because Muslims were not paying the zakat (yearly contributions to charity to be made by all Muslims according to Islam). But in addition, the performance of the water supply and regulatory agencies was perceived very negatively and there was a general belief that the management of water was unfair, with lack of access to, or frequent cuts in, the public water supply. People were regularly turning to the private sector for supplies, who were extracting and selling water. The campaign aims to address all sections of society from politicians, industrialists and civil servants, to students, farmers and women householders and will use different media and vehicles of communication for each group. Azzalab explained that while there will be a radio and television campaign throughout the area, the message will be conveyed to rural communities by direct communication through mosques, local councils, NGOs and women’s associations. In urban areas, the message will be delivered through schools and colleges, in addition to a media campaign using newspapers and posters. Speakers and participants at the workshop included representatives from the Ministry of Water and Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Association of Local Councils, the Yemen Women’s Union and members of the media. The workshop will be followed by a programme of training for community advocates and the designing of multimedia messages, in both broadcast and print form. If successful the Sana’a Basin IPAC will become a model for water campaigns elsewhere in the country and the region.