(26 Aug 2020) LEAD IN:
Many in rural areas struggle to access water in Tunisia, having to collect it using buckets and transport it on the backs of donkeys.
STORY-LINE:
Some Tunisians living close to the city of Kairouan have to travel for miles to reach a natural water source on the edge of a road outside the eastern city.
Faouzi Saidane's family members are collecting water one bucketful at a time.
They are collecting enough water for a week.
They will need this water to wash their clothes, to water plants and to give to the animals to drink.
Once they are done, they load the water on the backs of donkeys to carry it home.
"Since 2011 they said they are going to link our houses to the underground distribution network but nothing has been done," Saidane says.
Some rain would spare Saidane and his family the trip but low rainfall is part of the problem.
A lack of rain, combined with years of mismanagement of resources, has left reservoirs and dams in the country at extremely low levels.
The Sidi al-Baraq dam in Beja is one of the largest dams in Tunisia with a maximum capacity of 286 million cubic metres.
But with no rain, water levels in the dam have decreased to alarming levels and, parts of it are visibly dry.
In 2009, the World Bank warned that Tunisia was among the countries in the region facing water resource risks.
Today, regions across the country, from north to south, are being hit with water shortages.
The issue in Tunisia is not a lack of water resources but rather a mishandling of resources, says Ines Labiadh of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights.
"There are many rural areas that are not connected to the water distribution networks… there are large interruptions in urban areas and there is unsanitary water," she adds.
But the director of planning at the Tunisian ministry of agriculture says the problem lies in the amount of water stored in the dams.
There is a shortage of more than 400 million square metres this year, he says.
Tunisia faces a scarcity in water resources and the Tunisian citizen has 450 cubic metres of water per year, according to ministry of agriculture figures.
Water scarcity is marked at 1,000 cubic meters per person per year or less.
Tunisian researchers are looking for alternative solutions to traditional water resources such as desalination of seawater and underground water.
In 2018, Tunisia opened the largest seawater desalination plant on the island of Djerba in 2018, with a capacity of 50,000 cubic metres per day.
Nine new reservoirs and three desalination plants are being built.
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