Water - Middle East & North Africa

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is the world’s driest region. Water availability per person is around 1,200 cubic meters per person per year, compared with the average of about 7,000 worldwide. Half the region’s people already live under conditions of water stress. Water availability per capita is expected to halve by 2050, a trend that will likely be exacerbated as climate change make countries hotter and drier.

Agriculture uses 85 percent of the region’s water. Seven countries in the region are using more water every year than is available to them, mainly by over-pumping aquifers. The greatest need is to manage water for agriculture more efficiently, by pursuing efficient options for reusing water, desalination, and modernizing irrigation as well as implementing orderly mechanisms for the transfer of water to high-value urban and industrial uses.

More than three quarters of the population has access to water supply and improved sanitation. Most unserved people live in rural areas, though service in cities is often not continuous.

Key Water Challenges
Water resources management. While several countries in the region spend over 20 percent of their budgets on water, unsustainable and inefficient water use remains a major problem. Transboundary river basin management is required for the 60 percent of the region’s water flowing across international borders, is a major challenge. Water-related environmental problems cost many countries between 0.5 and 2.5 percent of GDP a year.

Water supply and sanitation: Countries need to extend water supply services to rural areas and the urban poor. Contaminated surface and groundwater have damaged both the environment and public health. Wastewater collection, treatment, and reuse have to be expanded.

Irrigation: Most of the region’s irrigation schemes use water wastefully. Cost-recovery in irrigation systems is low, leading to poor levels of maintenance and service. Many of the answers to the region’s water problems rest on changes to non-water policies, such as agricultural price supports that keep some crops artificially profitable, or energy subsidies that make pumping water from aquifers artificially cheap.

Hydropower: The MENA region has built more dams than any other region of the world when seen as a share of freshwater resources available. These investments in water storage have brought major benefits, such as smoothing supply between seasons, reducing flood risks, and producing electricity. But dams have also been associated with important negative effects. Countries are being confronted with the rising costs of rehabilitating and maintaining such large infrastructure networks and are becoming more aware of the forgone opportunities when the infrastructure is not used well or maintained properly. For instance, in Morocco, dam sedimentation reduces water storage capacity by about 50 million m3 per year, which was 0.5 percent of total capacity in 2000.

World Bank Response
Water resources management: Projects focus on groundwater management, water demand management, monitoring, water planning at the basin or aquifer level, environmental protection, and intersectoral coordination. The World Bank is also providing knowledge and technical expertise for analyzing the impacts of climate change and for designing least-cost adaptations to minimize such impacts.

Water supply and sanitation: Several World Bank projects in municipal development, rehabilitation, and community infrastructure focus on the urban poor and help to create independent public companies to serve small cities and towns. To improve utility performance, urban WSS operations in seven countries support reform and the improvement of sector finances, including through public-private partnerships. To improve sanitary conditions in urban areas, World Bank projects support the collection and treatment of wastewater. Support for rural WSS is generally provided through multi-sector programs for agriculture or through social funds.

Irrigation: Projects in several countries address the efficiency of water and energy use, decentralization of management responsibility to farmers’ associations, public-private partnerships, pricing policies, and re-use of treated wastewater.

Hydropower: The Bank supports countries in the ongoing and adaptive management of multi-purpose water infrastructure and focuses on institutional frameworks for managing scarcity to support effective hydro management and development.