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To help address water-energy-food (WEF) security, African cities have been urged to shift from the silos approach to the nexus approach.

Making the call in a welcome address, the Director of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)-Water Research Institute (WRI), Professor Mike Y. Osei-Atweneboana, explained that a nexus thinking will enhance water, energy, and food security.

Such an approach, he said, can help a city like Accra become more sustainable and resilient.

Prof Osei-Atweneboana was speaking at the opening of a 3-day Participatory Scenario Development workshop organised by the CSIR-Water Research Institute in Accra on Tuesday, July 6, 2021.

The workshop was organised as part of the implementation of the “Enhancing Sustainability and Resilience of African Cities through a Water-Energy-Food Nexus Approach” (EnsureWEF). The project is collaborative research between CSIR-Water Research Institute and research partners from Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya, with its overarching objective of enhancing the sustainability and resilience of African cities through an integrated and participatory knowledge generation, application, and governance through a WEF nexus approach.

The workshop also aimed to co-develop scenarios with stakeholders in the water, energy, and food sectors including government ministries and agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Community Based Organisations (CBOs) and stakeholders from the private sector.

The above, according to the organisers, will inform decision-making, planning, and governance of water, energy, and food resources for more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities.

According to Prof Osei-Atweneboana, Ghana as a country must strive to achieve universal access to water, energy and food.

However, he bemoaned that the current access was skewed against the poor or the vulnerable, noting that the “Covid-19 pandemic has uncovered and heightened inequitable access to water, energy, and food in our cities.”

“Global and regional drivers such as climate change will further exacerbate the situation,” he warned.

Dr. Emmanuel Obuobie, the Project Supervisor, who is also the Head of the Surface Water Division of the CSIR Water Research Institute, added that adoption of the nexus approach is now the current trend, even though it is not well established in developing countries, it comes with a lot of benefits particularly in the infrastructure development sectors, that is in the WEF environment in order to get the optimum benefit that comes with the integration.

He, however, said the initial implementation of the nexus approach could be challenging, "as we have been running in silos for a long time”.

“It will be difficult to integrate, as some institutions will lose part of their authority to other institutions,” he said, adding that “some institutions have to be ready to sacrifice some of their powers to make integration easy"

In the overview of the project by the Principal Investigator, Dr Deborah Darko, a Research Scientist of the CSIR Water Research Institute, she mentioned that the EnsureWEF project is one of the several projects supported by the Leading Integrated Research for Agenda 2030 in Africa program and funded by the Swedish International Development Corporation Agency. The project is run by the International Science Council in partnership with the Network of African Science Academy. “As indicated earlier, the project is being implemented in two cities in Africa, Accra (Ghana) and Kampala (Uganda) which are among the world’s fastest growing cities 2.93% & 4.03% respectively”.