The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat has installed portable handwashing facilities at the Beitbridge border post on the Zimbabwean side of its border with South Africa, at Chirundu Border Post between Zimbabwe and Zambia, at Nakonde/Tunduma one stop border post between Zambia and the United Republic of Tanzania, and at Songwe/Kasumulu border crossing between Malawi and Tanzania.
Global Water Partnership and the Government of Tanzania are working on strategies that will improve the country’s management of water resources, with the aim of increasing water security and improving the economy.
For the past 10 months, Malawi has been battling a cholera outbreak which health authorities have classified as the worst in decades. The outbreak has so far claimed over a thousand lives and recorded over 25,000 cases as of January 2023, with the case fatality rate standing at 3.3% as opposed to the less than 1% recommended by the World Health Organization.
The Government of Eswatini says the private sector needs to get involved in climate action to protect their own as well as the nation’s investments from the impacts of climate change. Government data shows that 80 percent of surveyed private sector enterprises reported that their businesses had been impacted by climate-related events, most of which had involved extreme and erratic rainfall and drought.
To inaugurate the “Built Water Storage in South Asia to enhance water security in the region” project, a series of inception workshops targeting the five designated countries, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan are being scheduled for five distinctive dates in January 2023.
At the invitation of ECCAS, a meeting was held between the ECCAS Department of Environment, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Rural Development (DERNADR) and GWP-Central Africa at the ECCAS headquarters in Libreville, Gabon in December 2022.
Southern Africa is endowed with a complex network of river systems, which are formed extensively from shared watercourses. 15 of the river basins within the region are shared between one or more countries, 13 of which are shared fully within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Cooperation is needed to promote sustainable management, development, and use of these shared water resources. This was one of the recommendations given during the special session on river basin organisations convened by SADC, OKACOM, and GWPSA on 20 October 2022 at the 23rd WaterNet/ WARFSA/ GWPSA Symposium.
The Continental Africa Water Investment Programme - Gender Transformative Water, Climate and Development (AIP WACDEP-G) Programme has brought to the fore the need for African governments to address issues of gender inequality if they are to effectively achieve water security and climate resilience.
Government, private sector, civil society officials and traditional leaders in Zambia’s Mazabuka District can now more effectively outline roadmaps for gender activities for water and climate change programmes being implemented by their institutions and communities, following a training that the Global Water Partnership Zambia (GWP Zambia) conducted in the district.
