Understanding Water Systems Resilience Problems in Tanzania

Abstract

The world’s biggest devastation is currently due to disasters; their consequences range from deaths and physical damages of infrastructures to environmental, ecological and economic losses. Water systems are critical infrastructures and are recurrently affected by the impacts of disasters. In Tanzania, these events play a part in infrastructures failures; the country has experienced 266 different disasters contributing to 13,288 deaths, 57,556 injuries, and damages valued at 465.79 million USD for the period from 1900 to 2016. Water systems, in particular, are a subject of exposure to disasters, their resilience has been tested and has shown different responses. Of concern is the El Nino episodes of 1992-1993 and 1997-1998 which had significant impacts nationwide regarding economic losses, power blackout and rationing, widespread water-related diseases, infrastructure destructions and others. As such, different studies have investigated water-related issues, but little is known about their resilience to disasters. This paper uses literature to examine the problems and improvement measures of water systems resilience at a global scale and the case of Tanzania. The findings show that aging infrastructures, systems interdependency, unbalanced investment, limited community involvement, rapid population growth and urbanization, regular changes of the water ministry and others affect the resilience of water systems. On the other hand, acceleration of assets replacement, preparedness, installation of alternative power supply, community involvement, policies and plans enforcement, and balanced investment and others would improve their resilience. However, further studies are required to measure the resilience across all dimensions systematically.