By Peter Yeung
ABIDJAN, June 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Every other day, Kouakou Marie Laure wakes up at 1 am to fetch water for her family.
The mother of three carries a bucket on her head back and forth to the nearest affordable water source, a couple of kilometres away, about a dozen times to replenish the family’s 200-litre tank.
The water usually lasts through two days of drinking, bathing, cleaning, and washing clothes.
Laure, utterly exhausted by the end, often isn’t finished until sunrise. Then she must leave again to work a full day as an assistant at a nearby school.
“Sometimes I don’t have enough energy and we just have to survive without much water for a while,” said the 39-year-old, sweating in Abidjan’s harsh midday sun.
Her concrete block home, shared between four families, lies in Abobo, a deprived district with extremely limited infrastructure and scant running water in the northern part of the Ivory Coast’s largest city.
Rapid population growth, increasing urbanisation and climate change have made it more difficult to supply water in Abidjan, and led to chronic shortages, residents and experts say.
“Since the 1970s, climate change has led to a fall of around 10% to 20% in rainfall, meaning that the underground water reserves that the city relies on are not being replenished and have reduced,” said Bamory Kamagaté, a water scientist at Nangui Abrogoua University in Abidjan.
Deforestation, urbanisation and farming also have reduced the quality of natural water, he added, while “uncontrolled growth” in population has increased demand.
