Nobel laureate lashes out at African leaders over water

Africa Science News Service: The 2006 Nobel peace price winner and Prof. Wangari Maathai has castigated African leaders for failing to come up with requisite policies adequate to address perennial water problems in the continent during the recent African Union (AU) Assembly of State and Government held in Sharm-El-Shaikh, Egypt.

Prof. Maathai says the high level meeting which was part of the ongoing 2008 AU Summit, being held under the theme Meeting Millennium Development Goals on Water and Sanitation did not live to its expectations due to what she termed as ‘insensitivity to the plight of the poor’.

“The summit was a flop because instead of addressing access to clean water and sanitation in the continent and how to achieve United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015, politics took centre stage. This is due to lack of understanding and appreciation of the importance of accessibility to clean water,” says the Nobel Peace Laureate.

Prof. Maathai who attended the summit, observes that the move was an indication that the leaders don’t have the interest of the people at heart especially women and children in Africa who still in this twenty first century walk for long distances to look for water.

Speaking at the Langata Greenbelt Training Center in Nairobi during the African Women and Water Conference on Friday, she wondered that despite the fact that the theme of the summit was water and sanitation and Africa being vulnerable to climate change, the leaders did not discuss water harvesting to harness rain water for consumption and irrigation.

Prof. Maathai advises that unless the leaders stop allowing people from cultivating in forest areas in their respective countries which are the main water catchment spots, provision of the precious commodity would remain elusive. “We should conserve our water catchment areas such as forests in order to address the water shortage problem in Africa. We should also manage our natural resources well,” added the professor…..

Photo of Wangari Maathai by Martin Rowe, who has generously released it into the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Thank you, Martin