Overview of Water Governance in Tamale Metropolis

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Overview of Water Governance in Tamale Metropolis

Introduction

Water is recognised as the most essential resource for earth’s ecosystem and human’s society. Global freshwater is often threatened by poor management, population growth couple with the recent menace of climate change. Water demand is predicted to increase by 55 percent in the world by 2050 and about 40 percent of the world population currently lives in water stress areas (OEDC, 2015).

Water resource management is crucial in ensuring sustainable water supply and maintaining the ecosystem, but this approach often fail in many countries due to poor government arrangements. Many water related problems can be attributed to governance failure at multiple levels of governance rather than to the resource base itself. Thus, water governance is imperative for water resource supply and management to succeed.

At this point one may ask, what exactly is water governance? According to Water Governance Facility, it refers to administrative systems put in place in terms of social, political and economic to influence water use and management and delivery of service at different levels of the society.   
(http://watergovernance.org/governance/what-is-water-governance/  ).

In a simpler term, water governance is a set of systems to control water resource development and management with regards to decision-making. Thus, it is all about decision making in water management and supply, who makes the decisions, how they are made and who is affected by those decisions (Moench et al., 2003). Water governance covers allocation of water resources between competing users, water storage management, aquifer extractions, regulations on discharge (Julia and Richard, 2008), and regulatory policies, legal frameworks exercise by formal and informal institutions. The new concept of combining formal and informal institutions is known as distributed governance (Charles, 2006). The notion of water governance aims at capturing the complexity of processes that determine the delivery of water related services for societal needs and that provide the context within which water management operates (GWP, 2003).

Effective water governance is pivotal for achieving sustainable development goal six. Over the years many governments across the world spend valuable resources and efforts to achieve the goal of good water governance (Verkerk, Hoekstra and Gerbens, 2008). This article seeks to outline water governance system in Tamale metropolis, Ghana with regards to its water supply systems and management, decentralized institutions, policies, regulations, legal frameworks, challenges of water governance and recommendations for way forward.

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Author

Clement Kamil Abdallah

Pan African University Institute of Water and Energy Science, Algeria.

Email: kabdallahclement@yahoo.com

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