NAIROBI, March 4 (Xinhua) -- Ministers of African countries in charge of water services on Monday began a three-day meeting in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, to discuss how to increase the African people's access to water and sanitation services.
The meeting gathered senior government officials and regional economic communities from across the continent to boost water security in the region.
In his opening remarks, Zachariah Njeru, Kenya's cabinet secretary for the Ministry of Water Sanitation and Irrigation, said that achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030 water and sanitation targets requires a significant increase in investments in Africa.
"Africa needs to increase its current annual allocation of 13 billion U.S. dollars by five times to address its infrastructure backlog for universal access to water and sanitation," Njeru added. He noted that failure to achieve global targets in water, sanitation and hygiene automatically holds back progress in all other sustainable development goals.
Rashid Mbaziira, executive secretary of the African Ministers Council on Water (AMCOW), said that the continent is lagging behind in most indicators for the SDGs on water despite having abundant water resources.
Climate change is affecting the sustainability and equitable access to water by residents in Africa, resulting in insufficient resilience to health and food system shocks as well as downgraded competencies to mitigate water-related disaster risks, Mbaziira said, adding that an estimated 800 million people in Africa are yet to have access to safely managed sanitation and basic hygiene services.
Tahani Sileet, chair of the Technical Advisory Committee of the AMCOW, said that about 450 million people in Africa do not have access to potable water. ■
