‘Africa must place water security at the centre of its economic strategy and elevate political ownership to the highest level’, AUDA-NEPAD CEO H.E. Nardos Bekele-Thomas told leaders at the African Union-AIP Africa Water Investment Summit in Cape Town (13-15 August 2025). She proposed appointing a Presidential Champion for Affordable, Reliable and Accelerated WASH access within the African Union’s Presidential Infrastructure Champion Initiative (PICI) to drive reforms, bankable projects and peer accountability toward universal water and sanitation by 2030.
The call came as South Africa, holding the 2025 G20 presidency, launched the Global Outlook Council on Water Investments, a legacy initiative to track finance, produce annual reports and align the G20, UN system, MDBs and private investors behind water investments.
Bekele-Thomas said ministerial commitments alone have not closed the continent’s funding and delivery gaps and that presidential stewardship is now required to unlock reforms, accelerate project preparation and ensure cross-sector alignment with health, education, agriculture, energy and finance portfolios. She also confirmed she has been invited to serve as a Champion of the new Global Outlook Council alongside other leaders—positioning AUDA-NEPAD to press for both domestic resource mobilisation and de-risked private capital at scale.
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The Cape Town gathering co-convened by the African Union Commission, AUDA-NEPAD and the AU’s Continental Africa Water Investment Programme (AIP), aimed to move beyond declarations to executable transactions. Organisers showcased a continental pipeline of more than 80 priority water and sanitation projects across 38 countries, prepared under PIDA PAP 2 and PICI frameworks, to facilitate matchmaking with financiers. Flagships include the VICMED navigational corridor championed by Egypt, the Lesotho-Botswana Water Project, the Angololo scheme on the Kenya–Uganda border and the binational Noordoewer–Vioolsdrift Dam between Namibia and South Africa.
Headline outcomes are designed to feed into the African Union’s 2026 Year of Water and Sanitation, creating a two-year runway for countries to translate pledges into capital programmes. South Africa’s government said the summit secured more than US$10 billion in pledges and deal flow toward Africa’s water pipeline, and leaders adopted a Cape Town Declaration calling for prioritised financing, stronger governance and scaled domestic resource mobilisation.
Bekele-Thomas urged a shift from viewing water purely as a social service to treating it as critical economic infrastructure underpinning industrialisation, food security and clean power. Climate-driven shocks have already exposed systemic risk: record-low levels at Lake Kariba in 2024 caused prolonged blackouts in Zambia and Zimbabwe, disrupting mining and manufacturing; across the Sahel, the 90% shrinkage of Lake Chad since the 1960s has compounded fragility. The message to investors and treasuries, she argued, is that water resilience is a macro-stability issue.
According to UNICEF, on the African continent, just 39% used safely managed drinking water (2020) and about 31% used safely managed sanitation (2022); accelerating to SDG 6 by 2030 requires a step-change in finance and execution. The AU’s High-Level Panel and AIP documents estimate ~ US$50 billion per year is needed to reach water security by 2030, against current flows of US$10–19 billion; the AIP therefore targets mobilising at least US$30 billion annually in additional investment and has instituted an AIP-PIDA Water Investment Scorecard to track delivery and accountability.
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Beyond political signalling, the summit focused on “manufacturing bankability”: standardising preparation, de-risking early stages and tightening utility governance so projects can clear investment committees faster. AUDA-NEPAD and partners presented the 80-project pipeline to close feasibility gaps and crowd in blended finance and commercial capital. This approach aligns with wider moves in Africa’s climate-infrastructure market—Africa50’s AGIA-PD fund announced a US$118 million first close in Maputo on August 13 to finance the riskiest phase of green infrastructure development across energy, transport, water and digital, with AfDB anchoring US$40 million to absorb first-loss risk.
The proposed Presidential Champion for WASH would operate within the AU’s Presidential Infrastructure Champion Initiative architecture, which since 2011 has empowered heads of state to unblock cross-border infrastructure by elevating decisions, coordinating regulators and accelerating permits and land, particularly for transboundary assets. Embedding water within PICI would mirror the political mechanics that have advanced corridors in transport and energy, providing a direct line from heads of state to implementing agencies and financiers.
The Global Outlook Council on Water Investments, launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa under South Africa’s G20 presidency, is intended to globalise Africa’s investment playbook: it will monitor disbursements, produce an annual scorecard, and align the G20, UN and MDBs behind a Global Water Investment Platform that scales the AIP model beyond Africa. Early communications indicate participation by current and former heads of state and major philanthropies, with the council positioned as a permanent high-level venue for deals, policy and accountability.
With the AU’s formal Year of Water and Sanitation in 2026 confirmed, governments now have clear milestones: close financing for priority projects; operationalise performance-based grants to crowd in private capital; digitise water accounting and leakage control; and publish scorecard results to keep momentum and investor confidence. The Cape Town outcomes, if followed by rapid preparation and transparent procurement, give Africa a two-year window to show that water can be financed, tracked and championed with the same urgency that has begun to transform its power and digital sectors.
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