Gurudeo Tularam

By Gurudeo Anand Tularam and Gowri Sameera Attili

Part of the book: Risk Management

By Omar Moalin Hassan and Gurudeo Anand Tularam

Water is essential for the existence of living organisms including humans. Water is needed in farms to grow crops, firms and manufacturing industry to produce products and services. This chapter examines water resources availability and management in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in climate change perspective using vector auto-regression (VAR) time series analysis. Water is known to be unevenly distributed among countries and continents around the world, particularly in Sub-Sahara Africa; the water availability varies between member countries and regions in the individual country, water supply systems experience enormous pressure to make water accessible to people in both rural and urban communities. Water security remains to be an integral part of the SSA’s effort to achieve food security and supply, halve poverty and eradicate hunger. This chapter more importantly aims to investigate impact of rainfall and temperature issues––that are climate change proxy variables––on water security and people movement in three Sub-Saharan African countries that are Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Niger. This article assesses some possible causes of migration from rural to urban area using VAR and granger causality tests; this process involves four variables namely Rural Migration ‘MR’, Urban Migration ‘MU’, Rainfall ‘Rain’ and Temperature ‘Temp’. The model predicts rainfall and temperature across 10 years and examines how these changes impact water availability and people movement in relevant countries. This study finds that some countries are experiencing water security challenges upon which large numbers migrate to urban areas. The study reveals that variations in rainfall and temperature have compounded people movements from rural areas. It is noted that the agricultural production in SSA have not improved over time and in fact, it has further decreased due to the move away from rural areas by many farmers.

Part of the book: Applications in Water Systems Management and Modeling