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Helping Three African Countries Maintain an Important Shared Resource

The Okavango River provides home and livelihood to thousands of plants, animals and people in Southern Africa. As it winds through hundreds of miles of terrain, this vital resource holds powerful potential to unite Angola, Botswana, and Namibia—the three countries that share the basin.

However, water scarcity is a growing concern in Southern Africa, where 75 percent of the region’s surface water resources are shared among two or more countries. As communities look to the future, it is evident that transboundary management is key to maintaining important shared resources, including the Okavango River Basin.

Angola, Botswana, and Namibia formed the Permanent Okavango River Basin Water Commission (OKACOM) in 1994 to address mutual concerns about the river’s future. Ideally, the river can continue to provide benefits for the different communities of the three countries.

In Namibia and Angola, priorities include developing water irrigation and power generation in water-scarce areas. Downstream in Botswana, the river forms a delta in the Kalahari Desert. The delta’s nature-rich waterways, floodplains, forested islands and lagoons have enabled a booming ecotourism industry that is vital to the country’s economy. Without sustainable management of the entire basin, the delta’s fragile ecosystem would likely suffer.

The Okavango Integrated River Basin Management Project is a four-year activity financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Regional Center for Southern Africa. ARD, Inc., a Tetra Tech company, is working with a consortium members and local partners in all three countries, guiding OKACOM to become a stronger, more effective institution. The objective of this project is to strengthen institutional, legal, regulatory, technical, and community capacity to manage the region’s transboundary river basin resources. This support will enable OKACOM to better manage these resources in the best interest of all.

Highlights:

• While providing interim secretariat services for OKACOM, clarified the legal framework and established a permanent Secretariat to support OKACOM initiatives.
• Conducted pioneering biodiversity inventories, social consultations and capacity building toward enhanced protected area status and management of over 17 million acres of land in Southeast Angola, in an area critical to the proposed 5-country Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA-TFCA).
• Rehabilitated eleven hydrologic monitoring stations in the Angola portion of the basin and trained technicians to collect water resources data for use in planning and flood early warning.