Scaling-up water management solutions in Africa and the Middle East

Malak Draz — Country Manager, West and Central Africa, Public Sector Operations, OPEC Fund for International Development 
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Water is a double-edged sword: essential for life and agriculture, but also a source of danger through excess in terms of floods and dearth in terms of droughts. The question, therefore, becomes one of maintaining the balance — managing flows in the wet season and saving water in the dry season.

Governments should already be working on these issues, given the increasingly destructive power of water over lives and infrastructure in the context of climate change. Our session will also feature private sector knowledge on how to manage water levels and deploy new technological solutions. Panelists include:

• Cyril Courjaret, CEO of Suez, a water multinational that works across Africa and around the world, will present the company’s expertise in developing sustainable water infrastructure and providing access to water through resilient and innovative solutions (e.g. desalination). 
• Yuliya Vystavna, a hydrologist from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who will speak about new technologies for water resource assessment and management at local and national levels. 
• Yogita Mumssen, Water Global Practice Manager at the World Bank, who’ll share lessons learned — what worked, what could have gone better, what did not work — across multiple regions.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the OPEC Fund contributed a US$30 million loan to develop an extra capacity of 220,000 cubic meters of drinking water per day for the capital, Kinshasa. By giving access to clean water, this project is tangibly improving living conditions for the city’s 10 million inhabitants, as part of a project co-financed by the World Bank and the government of the DRC.