Public water for climate resilience
Today, civil society organisations, community networks, youth groups, trade unions and grassroots movements across Africa converge to launch the fifth Africa Week of Action Against Water Privatisation, a continent-wide mobilisation under the Our Water Our Right Africa Coalition (OWORAC). From 13–18 October 2025, under the theme Public Water for Climate Resilience, this campaign will assert OWORAC’s simple, consistent and urgent claim that water is a public good and a human right which must never be surrendered to the logic of profit.
The choice of this year’s theme reflects the reality and severity of the moment. Africa faces multiple and overlapping environmental challenges, and climate change in particular, often reveals itself most forcefully through water. Across the continent, intense and prolonged droughts, devastating floods, coastal erosion, and increasing unpredictability in rainfall are disrupting lives and livelihoods.
In the Horn of Africa, successive seasons of drought have dried rivers and wells, leaving millions dependent on humanitarian aid. In places like Mozambique and Nigeria, catastrophic cyclones and floods submerge boreholes and wells, leaving thousands without safe water and compounding outbreaks of water-borne diseases. In North Africa, rising seas push saltwater into fragile coastal aquifers, while intensifying heat drains rivers and reservoirs through rapid evaporation, leaving communities caught between contaminated groundwater and vanishing surface supplies. In the Sahel, irregular rainfall unsettles agriculture and fuels conflict over shrinking water sources. All of these shocks collide with decades of underinvestment in public water systems, leaving societies doubly exposed to climate extremes and deprived of the infrastructure that might have cushioned their impact.
Ordinarily, these challenges should serve as a wake-up call for governments to invest in stronger publicly governed water systems capable of protecting life under climate stress. Yet, in many African states, the opposite is taking place. Governments, often at the behest of private sector and international financiers, have seized on these crises to justify the transfer of water provision to private actors. The most striking example is the surge in desalination projects, promoted as a climate-proof solution. But desalination is no panacea. It is extremely energy-intensive, largely dependent on fossil fuels, and produces a concentrated salty waste called brine that pollutes marine ecosystems, destroys fisheries, and further dispossesses coastal communities.
Desalinated water is also more expensive than conventional sources. In other parts of the world where it has been introduced, such as the Carlsbad plant in California, the cost of desalinated water is 73 percent higher than the existing supply according to Food & Water Watch, even as it has been flagged multiple times for environmental violations.
In Tunisia, desalinated water is estimated to cost up to three times more than reservoir water, with energy alone making up forty percent of the cost. Such exorbitant expenses create the perfect opening for multinational corporations to build and operate the plants, granting private engineering firms and utilities access to systems that were once public.
For example, last year, the Kingdom of Morrocco entered into a 35-year concession with Veolia to develop and manage a massive seawater desalination project, planned to be the largest in Africa and the second largest in the world, and framed as a solution to supply drinking water to drought-stricken regions of the country. Yet Veolia’s global record is far from reassuring. In Bucharest, Romania, as in other places where its record is marred by controversy, its 25-year water concession saw tariffs rise almost six-fold, forcing households to bear the heavy costs of privatisation.
We reject this trend outright. The climate crisis must not be turned into a pretext for water privatisation. Climate resilience is not an abstract slogan neither is it built on the transfer of public goods into private hands. It is the capacity of societies to absorb shocks, protect ecosystems and guarantee continuity of life when disaster strike. Public water systems, when adequately financed and managed democratically, are the backbone of such resilience. They carry the potential to plan for the long term, to extend service to marginalised communities, and to integrate social equity with environmental protection.
Privatisation, by contrast, undermines resilience and thrives on short-term profit. Its record across Africa and beyond is consistent, neglecting low-income and rural communities considered unprofitable, as well as raising tariffs that lock the poor out of access. In times of climate stress, such model only deepens exclusion and leaves societies exposed to disaster.
Colleagues, brothers and sisters, it is against this backdrop that this year’s Africa Week of Action situates itself. For the next few days, OWORAC and its allies will coordinate activities to expose the harms of privatisation and highlight alternatives rooted in public, equitable, and climate-ready provision. Our mobilisation will elevate the voices of those who live with water insecurity and climate shocks, insisting that their needs be placed at the centre of policy.
To start with, we urge African governments to put human need before financial returns and call on international institutions to end the destructive practice of tying privatisation conditions to loans. We further demand that corporate profiteers take their hands off Africa’s water and stop using the climate crisis as a pretext to plunder the environment and control a resource so fundamental to survival. Africa’s water cannot be auctioned off to the highest bidder without imperilling the very basis of life.
The alternative is not utopian. Climate-resilient water governance can be achieved through pathways that strengthen public systems rather than dismantle them. Sustained public financing must be channelled into water and sanitation infrastructure, ensuring that utilities are not only functional but robust enough to withstand future shocks.
Investments in renewable energy can reduce the carbon intensity of water provision, ensuring that adaptation efforts do not fuel the very crisis they seek to mitigate. Protection and restoration of watersheds, wetlands and aquifers can anchor ecological resilience, while participatory governance guarantees that communities themselves shape decisions about their water.
Crucially, the incorporation of indigenous practices such as rainwater storage, aquifer recharge and community-led catchment management can provide culturally grounded, low-cost and sustainable pathways to expand resilience in the face of climate uncertainty. Public water partnerships across regions can facilitate peer learning, exchange of expertise and continental solidarity, building African solutions to African challenges without reproducing dependence on corporate monopolies.
Climate resilience will not be delivered through privatisation schemes that entrench inequality and exclusion. It will only be built through strong, transparent and publicly accountable systems that protect water as a common good and guarantee access for all. Africa’s governments must resist the tide of commodification and instead chart a future where water remains firmly in public hands, managed for people and not for profit, and secured as the foundation of life in an era of intensifying climate crisis.
SIGNED
- Senegalese Water Justice Network (Senegal)
- Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) (Nigeria)
- Revenue Mobilisation Africa (Ghana)
- Syndicat Autonome des Travailleurs des Eaux du Senegal (Senegal)
- Corporate Accountability (USA)
- African Centre for Policy and Advocacy (Cameroon)
- Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (Kenya)
- Institute of Black World (USA)
- Cheriehomes Global Initiatives (Nigeria)
- Syndicat National Autonome des Travailleurs de l’Energie, de L’Eau ef des Mines du Cameroun (SYNATEEC) (Cameroon)
- Matabeleland Institute for Human Rights (Zimbabwe)
- Youth Go Green Network- (Liberia)
- Center for Environmental Justice CJE (Togo)
- Gender CC Southern Africa
- Health of Mother Earth Foundation (Nigeria)
- Lekeh Development Foundation (Nigeria)
- Household Disaster Resilience Project -Help- (The Gambia)
- Disability Is Not A Barrier Initiative, DINABI (Nigeria)
- Odeibea Foundation (Ghana)
- Liberty Pro bono Initiative for Environmental Justice (Uganda)
