Failing water management in Tunisia: limited water sectors in North Africa?

Reflecting on the previous post that investigated Morocco’s corrupted water sector, I was intrigued to investigate the limitations of the Tunisian water sector. This post will do so.

Water-scarcity is severe in Tunisia. This scarcity has especially been aggravated in the last seven years by the yearly-droughts that Tunisia faced. This has exacerbated locals and led to national thirst uprisings in 2016 (Fig. 1) (Soula et al., 2020).

Figure 1: The reserves of the Sili Salem Dam in 2016 were half of those in 2015 (Sky News, 2016). 

Because there has been little rainfall, surface waters have become very scarce and Tunisians have intensively exploited underground water resources, to a point of over-exploitation - something we explored in the second post of this blog. For instance, the Mahdian region exploited its groundwater with an average exploitation rate of 106.2% (Soula et al., 2020). 

How has the country so badly managed water use that it has come to the point of over-exploiting its resources? 

Many explanations are accountable for the bad management of water resources. One explanation is that Tunisia lacks control over its groundwater withdrawals. For instance, in Mahdia, access to groundwater resources is not subject to any authorisation. There are no water-meters to limit water withdrawals, which increases withdrawn quantities and prevents the government to monitor these withdrawn volumes (ibid). 

Another explanation to bad management of water resources is that the Tunisian government has not adapted its policies to new water infrastructures. In the region, groundwater exploitation rates are correlated with the increased number of wells and the transition of technology from diesel mechanical pumping to electric pumping (ibid) (Fig. 2). With technological change, water use became cheaper. As water became cheaper, the water demand increased and overall consumption has kept increasing since. This phenomenon is known as the Jevons Paradox  (ibid). Therefore, Tunisia’s water sector is limited due to bad management strategies, whereas the Moroccan water sector is limited due to corrupted water actors and services. 

Figure 2: Shallow groundwater exploitation in the region of Mahdia in 2016 (Soula et al., 2020) 

If we make a parallel between the deficient water services of Morocco and Tunisia, we find a common history that could account for a second explanation for the limitation of the water-sector in the region. Both Morocco and Tunisia were colonised, both under French protectorate and both until 1956. 

Before colonialism, Maghrebian cultivators employed simple technologies such as catchment areas (masakat) techniques to harvest rain from uplands and water was managed by other forms of organisations -such as brotherhoods- to conserve water. These small-scale water services and actors were sufficient to provide water for agricultural and drinking use (Huxley, 1996). 

Colonialism eventually took place at the end of the nineteenth century and with it came large water plans. Large dams and large-scale irrigation systems that were initially adapted to water-rich European states were implemented in Tunisia and Morocco. These plans were all supervised by new social organisations, all planned to benefit the colonising state (ibid). Théodore Steeg, a French lawyer, for instance initiated the construction in 1926 of the El Kansera Dam, one of the biggest irrigation dams in Morocco (Silva, 2019) (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: El Kansera dam constructed under French protectorate (Silva, 2019)

Today, both countries’ water systems have only fairly changed since colonisation. European colonists created these water systems to benefit colonisation, sometimes at the expense of local cultivators. For instance, the El Kansera dam responded to the will to create a colonisation perimeter with a system that would permit permanent irrigation of farmland (Silva, 2019). The fact that today's water systems in Morocco and Tunisia were initially designed to benefit colonisation is a second plausible explanation to the limited water-sector and water services of Morocco and Tunisia. These highly-centralised water systems have since colonisation never been adapted to the local practices and resources.