Water security is critical to building sustainable cities and ensuring progress towards other sustainable development goals, such as food security, good health and well-being, climate action, sustainable energy, quality education, and sustainable industrialisation and innovation.The World Bank Group notes, quoting David Grey and Claudia Sadoff in their paper published in the journal, Water Policy (2007), that this goes beyond physical resource scarcity and entails “an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems, and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks to people, environments, and economies.” It further notes that “water insecurity slows growth and impedes…
Sikhululekile Mashingaidze
Do the cons outweigh the pros for people living with wildlife under Zimbabwe’s well-meaning Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE)? In October, Africa in Fact interviewed a handful of residents of the Tsholotsho Ward 1 community, in Matabeleland North, to find out. CAMPFIRE was introduced in the 1980s as a community-centric approach that would enhance local livelihoods through mutually beneficial, collective wildlife management mechanisms. It was perceived as a departure from the exclusionary colonial approach of preservation that focused on protecting these natural resources from any use at all to enabling communities’ partial ownership and control that was expected…
Social exclusion is one of the known drivers of conflict, sometimes leading to violence and wars when certain groups of people are denied access to their society’s resources, institutions, and opportunities. The Just Energy Transition (JET), the proposed transitional pathway from fossil fuels, is a vision for a low-carbon future, perceived in some sectors as an opportunity for communities to benefit from their mining resources, gain access to sustainable energy options while aiding in meeting the targets of the fast approaching window of the Paris Agreement. Communities are key stakeholders in the implementation of energy and climate policies hence community participation…