Community-led wetland restoration may hold key to Harare’s water crisis

This is the first part of an analysis on Harare’s water crisis

Aimee Gabay and Tatenda Chitagu

HARARE — By 6 a.m. on Sunday, the line at a water well in Harare’s Budiriro suburb is already long. It snakes all the way into a nearby street, and some people have begun fighting over who should get water first. If they’re lucky, they get clean water once a week. In other suburbs of Zimbabwe’s capital, it can take weeks or months.

Meanwhile, as the water crisis grows, the city’s wetlands, which were once able to easily store water, are being drained for new housing developments or paved surfaces as the city grows. This is also happening across the country. According to a 2022 audit of Zimbabwe’s Environmental Management Agency’s (EMA) wetlands protection, these ecosystems are being converted for commercial activities, such as construction, mining and agriculture.

“As the city is developing, it’s encroaching more and more into the wetland areas,” says Robert Neil Cunliffe, an independent environmental consultant from Harare. “Those areas are being converted from a natural grassland community to a paved surface.”

In the capital, 3,717 hectares (9,185 acres) of wetlands have so far been affected by construction, which translates to about 16 percent of its wetlands, according to the audit. Other factors, such as inadequate enforcement of orders and pollution, are also responsible for the decline of the country’s wetlands.

After decades of witnessing water mismanagement and the destruction of wetlands across the city, residents and local organizations have joined forces with city officials to protect and restore a small, 34-hectare (84-acre) wetland in the suburb of Monavale, also known as Monavale Vlei, a Ramsar site. The vlei, the name for a shallow lake in many parts of Southern Africa, forms part of a network of wetlands in the Manyame catchment area, which are the primary source of water for the City of Harare.

The initiative “provides a model” for what restoration and protection of all of Harare’s wetlands could look like, says Dorothy Wakeling, the Monavale Vlei programme manager.

Studies have shown that wetlands can be a solution to water crises in cities, as they can provide water storage, groundwater recharge and water purification, as well as other services such as flood mitigation, carbon capture and storage, and temperature moderation. Wetlands perform many other services, Cunliffe said, “but water is probably most crucial.”

The Conservation of Monavale (COSMO) Trust, a community-based voluntary initiative, is leading the restoration effort. This was after they saw siltation, mostly caused by construction, increasing in Lake Chivero, the main source of water for Harare that’s also connected to the vlei. At the moment, the lake has lost 20-30 percent of its capacity as a result of silting, and residents with boreholes continue to drill deeper, more than 40 metres (130 feet), to replenish their wells as underground water supplies dwindle.

Southern Africa is in the grip of a severe drought, leaving close to 70 million people with inadequate food or water. In Mudzi, a district in northern Zimbabwe, rivers and dams have dried up, leaving residents digging into the riverbeds, desperate to extract any water they can.

For some residents of Monavale, the restoration initiative was seen as a long-needed shift from a wetland management model that focused on development to one that embraces the natural power of waterways and their surrounding ecosystems.

Pollution and a need for more houses

Monavale Vlei is part of a network of wetlands whose streams and rivers flow down into Harare’s main water supply dam, Lake Chivero. As the wetlands are located at the highest point of the watershed, their protection is vital to the health and maintenance of the catchment downstream, sources say.

But in the midst of a water crisis, these wetlands, also seen as “natural infrastructure” for their ability to act as sponges and protect against floods, aren’t receiving the protection ecologist say is needed.

“There are towns and cities facing water challenges owing to natural infrastructure not being protected, and as the degradation continues towns and cities are impacted,” Julia Pierini, chief executive officer of BirdLife Zimbabwe, a partner of COSMO, told Mongabay by phone.

Harare has faced a water crisis for many years due to a combination of factors: pollution, increased demand, inadequate infrastructure, governance issues, drought, and climate change, sources say. The city’s sewage and water infrastructure in many places are in poor condition, leading to several cholera outbreaks over the years. — mongabay.com

To be continued in the next Suburban Edition