Arid Lands Newsletter--link to home pageALN #45, Spring/Summer 1999
Water in Cities

Integrating Urban and Agricultural Water Management in Southern Morocco

by Thomas E. Rhodes

"Morocco has committed to a program to rationalize and optimize water management that precisely follows the international consensus on water management articulated at Dublin and since adopted by a variety of international organizations. (...) USAID hopes to take advantage of this unique opportunity to simultaneously support decentralization, economic development, and improved environmental quality by assisting in the establishment of [a River Basin Authority] in the Souss-Massa region, east of Agadir. This paper describes some on-going projects in integrated water management that will be enlarged and replicated in [USAID's] broader work with the RBA. "


Introduction

(Back to top)

Morocco runs on water. Forty percent of the economically active population works in agriculture, a large portion of the transportation and industrial sectors process and move farm products, and agribusinesses account for a third of the export market. Two-thirds of these exports are produced by irrigated agriculture, which uses 90 percent of the nation's captured freshwater. While expansion of Morocco's network of large and medium dams can increase the supply of water by as much as one-fourth, projected doubling of the population over the next 30 years, especially in urban and industrial centers, will result in massive increases in demand and decreases in per capita income unless fresh water is used and allocated more efficiently. As a harbinger of the risks, the country was forced to transport drinking water to cities like Tangier by boat in 1995, while industries closed for lack of water.

Underlying these economic considerations for improving water resources management are issues of health and social welfare. Most directly, diarrheal disease remains the leading killer of children under five. Economic growth and educational opportunities are stunted, especially for rural women who spend an average of 90 minutes a day hauling water in rural areas. Water scarcity is also a catalyst to Morocco's rapid urbanization, as farmers unable to pay for new wells are forced to join the rural exodus.

Together with its Moroccan partners, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has responded to these needs through programs to improve water resources management in the agricultural, urban, and industrial sectors. For example, irrigation management practices developed since 1995 in the Tadla Irrigated Perimeter, near Beni Mellal, are already saving enough water to meet the annual needs of a city of 500,000 people (that is, a city the size of Fes). On the urban side, USAID's infrastructure programs in mushrooming peri-urban areas provided clean water and sanitation to 120,000 households between 1994 and 1998, directly improving their quality of life, and increasing the economic viability of these areas.

Despite success in these programs and the technical skills of sector-specific Moroccan agencies involved in water management, there is minimal integration across sectors, especially between the increasingly competitive rural and urban water users. To face imminent water scarcity, Morocco needs to integrate the disparate resources of local, regional, and national agencies in agriculture, infrastructure, environment, potable water, health, and land management into a sustainable system in which the principles of equity, efficiency, and transparency are used to improve social welfare and economic growth.

Morocco has committed to a program to rationalize and optimize water management that precisely follows the international consensus on water management articulated at Dublin and since adopted by a variety of international organizations. The key step in this restructuring was taken in 1995, when a law decentralizing financial and planning authority for water resources to a small number of river basin agencies (RBA) was enacted.

USAID hopes to take advantage of this unique opportunity to simultaneously support decentralization, economic development, and improved environmental quality by assisting in the establishment of an RBA in the Souss-Massa region, east of Agadir. This paper describes some on-going projects in integrated water management that will be enlarged and replicated in our broader work with the RBA.

Regional Profile

(Back to top)
Thumbnail image of cement block housing
Thumbnail link to image of cement block housing, ~20K file

The Souss and Massa River Basins extend east from the regional capital of Agadir to the High Atlas and Anti Atlas Mountain ranges, forming a wedge of 27,000 square km. The region's 2,500,000 people are about equally divided between rural and urban settlements. Urban populations have grown enormously in the past decade, as drought has pushed people out of subsistence farming, and economic opportunities have pulled people into towns where there is at least seasonal work in export agriculture, tourism, fishing, and transportation. The region is arid to semi-arid, receiving 250 mm of rain in an average year. Irrigation from reservoirs and groundwater enables the region to produce over 60% of Morocco's agricultural exports (mostly citrus and tomatoes), but the overdrawn aquifer is falling by 1.5 m per year in some areas. The large majority of urban residents have household water connections, but only about half have sanitation facilities. Both water and sanitation services are relatively rare in rural areas.

Pilot Projects in Two Towns

(Back to top)
Thumbnail image of cement block housing
Thumbnail link to image of open cesspool at Drarga, ~20K file

USAID/Morocco is assisting community-based development of more integrated water resources in the towns of Drarga, a few kilometers from Agadir, and Ouled Teima, a market center 50 km to the east. In Drarga, the community of 6,000 had itself built and operated a water supply system, and wished to extend the sanitation system and replace an unsafe and noxious cesspool. A wide variety of partners are contributing to the sustainability of this project and the dissemination of the model: substantial additional funding was obtained from the Moroccan housing development agency (ERAC Sud), the wastewater treatment design was based on a French-built pilot project, and the German agency KfW is planning to replicate the activity in a neighboring community.

The new wastewater treatment system has been designed to be at least partially self-supporting, through further utilization or sale of various treatment byproducts. Methane produced by anaerobic digestion of sewage will power the plant's generator, treated wastewater will be sold to neighboring greenhouses, and the stems of reeds grown for denitrification will be sold for structural uses. The community will bear the burden of additional fees, but the original grass-roots support for the program has been maintained through extensive consultations. For example, when none of the proposed sites for the new facility were acceptable to the community, project managers started anew and eventually identified a more desirable site.

Thumbnail image of cement block housing
Thumbnail link to image of newly constructed housing at Drarga, ~20K file

Full operations are expected to begin in the fall of 1999, and as the project moves toward the dissemination phase, attention is going less to engineering than to replication of:

  1. Drarga's active community associations;
  2. Integration of water reuse strategies in urban sanitation planning;
  3. Integration of techniques to achieve groundwater quality in urban sanitation planning;
  4. Cooperation of local, national, and international partners, especially for financing.

In the 55,000-person town of Ouled Teima, neighborhood associations formed with limited USAID and governmental assistance to address solid waste and housing problems have extended their activities to provide sanitation to crowded neighborhoods relying on shallow cesspools. These neighborhoods have sprung up quickly in recent decades, and lack coherent plans for development. Complex, unenforced zoning laws have further discouraged orderly urban development. Residents did not want to wait for a sewerage system that is still in the design phase, but did not want to waste resources installing pipes that would have to be replaced in a few years. Neighborhood associations are therefore working closely with municipal and regional authorities to assure that any systems installed now will conform to the requirements of the new, anticipated system. Households that join associations and install sewers are given assistance obtaining title to their property.

USAID has just completed a one-year effort to strengthen NGOs and bring together community associations, farmers, local and regional government, ministries, and parastatal organizations to improve water management and use and develop a complete sewerage and water reuse system. Principal results to date are:

  1. improved operation of the associations;
  2. co-management agreements between associations, water management agencies, and the municipality;
  3. design for a wastewater reuse program; and
  4. development of a model for integrated water resources management in municipalities.

Twin pilot wastewater treatment plants are being built to compare the efficiency of traditional lagunage and high-rate algal treatments, especially in terms of producing agriculturally usable water. Advancement of planning for urban water reuse in this agricultural region has been one of the project's greatest preoccupations, and may turn out to be a major success. Most of the town's collected sewage is already used, raw, for irrigation, raising obvious health issues for both farmers and consumers. The importance of these issues stretches their impacts across the domains of a remarkable number of local, regional, and national agencies, at once demonstrating the need for integrated planning and proving why it is so difficult to accomplish.

Health Impacts of Water Resources Management

(Back to top)

Improved health, and especially children's health, has long been a fundamental goal of USAID programs around the world. Easy access to good-quality water is an obvious precondition for achieving acceptably low rates of diarrheal disease, but access and quality alone are not sufficient. Despite years of development investments, it is not clear whether infrastructure improvement is the most cost-effective approach to improving children's health. Whether the overall economic and environmental impacts of water management are great or small, they cannot be calculated without knowing direct health benefits. The best comparative work on the subject (Esrey et al., 1991) found little difference in the benefits of projects in water quantity, water quality, sanitation, or behavioral change. Average improvements in child morbidity were typically between 20% and 30%, but variation was huge, and only a few examples of each intervention could be studied.

In order to improve the effectiveness of integrated water programs that include prevention of disease in children, USAID and partners are performing a household-level study comparing water and sanitation infrastructure, food-handling and sanitation behaviors, and prevalence of diarrheal disease in children in different neighborhoods of Drarga and Ouled Teima. Risk factors for diarrheal disease are being identified in terms of both environmental infrastructure (e.g., leaking septic tanks, insufficient number of latrines, unprotected wells, absence of household hook-ups, etc.) and household behaviors (e.g., water transport and storage methods, maintenance of latrines, hand-washing, etc.). All of these factors will be correlated to prevalence of diarrheal disease in individual households and in neighborhoods of 40 to 800 households. In addition, risk factors will be compared to the governance structures at the neighborhood, community, municipal, and regional levels that can be brought to bear on improving them. Initial data from hospital admissions in Ouled Teima and around Morocco suggests that infrastructure programs have been highly effective in reducing childhood diarrhea and improving living standards in general, but the data are poorly constrained.

Conclusion

(Back to top)

There are many promising opportunities to improve water management to the benefit of the health and well-being of the people of the Souss-Massa region. As we continue to refine our approaches and broaden the constituencies for water resource management, our interventions are becoming more complicated. We are continuing to seek models of integrated, rational, transparent, and participative water management in the belief that they will be more sustainable, and that after a point the process will become less complicated.

References

(Back to top)

Esrey, S.A., J.B. Potash, L. Roberts, C. Shiff. 1991. Effects of improved water supply and sanitation on ascariasis, diarrhoea, dracunculiasis, hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, and trachoma. Bull World Health Organ 69(5):609-21.

bar denoting end of article text

Author information

(Back to top)

Thomas A. Rhodes works for both the U.S. Agency for International Development/Morocco, and the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service. You can contact him by email as follows:

E-Mail: TRHODES@USAID.GOV

PSC 74, Box 22
APO AE 09718

Additional web resources:

(Back to top)

USAID's Environmental Health Project: http://www.ehproject.org
USAID's Home Page: http://www.info.usaid.gov/

About the Arid Lands Newsletter

Link to ALN home page Link to index page for back web issues Link to index page for pre-web issue archive Link to this issue's table of contents