Dams, health, and livelihoods: Lessons from the Senegal, suggestions for Africa

Abstract

Efforts in previous decades, largely culminating in the release of the World Commission on Dams Report [44], have engendered a more circumspect approach to dam construction and operations ‐ one which incorporates consideration for the environment, health, equity, stakeholders, and livelihoods. Such integration nevertheless often remains at a rhetorical level, preventing tangible incorporation of these factors into Decision Support Tools (DSTs) for water management at a basin or sub‐basin level. This paper uses the experience of the Senegal River Basin (SRB) to generate suggestions for how public health and smallholder livelihood concerns can be explicitly and quantitatively incorporated into dam planning and operations decisions in Africa's other basins. The study examines the operational tradeoffs made among livelihoods, health, and more conventional water needs such as irrigation and hydropower in SRB water management strategies over the last two decades. The examination of these tradeoffs is used to develop common health and economic metrics to aid water management decisions. In conclusion, suggestions are made for how utilization of these common metrics can enable DSTs in Africa's other basins to incorporate public health and smallholder livelihood parameters into dam planning and operations decisions.