UN-HABITAT has been implementing the Water for African Cities Programme since 1999. The programme is a direct follow-up  to the Cape Town Declaration, adopted by African Ministers in December 1997, addressing the urgent need for improved water management in urban areas of the continent.

The world’s governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve the number of people who lack access to safe water, mainly in the world’s cities, by 2015. With rapidly growing urban populations the challenge is immense. Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed. This influential publication by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) sets out in detail the scale of inadequate provision of water and sanitation. It describes the impacts on health and economic performance, showing the potential gains of remedial action; it analyses the proximate and underlying causes of poor provision and identifies information gaps affecting resource allocation; it outlines the consequences of further deterioration; and it explains how resources and institutional capacities – public, private and community – can be used to deliver proper services through integrated water resource management.