Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with a high population density and fast population growth. Low economic status, poverty and food insecurity characterize the region. Most countries are regular food aid recipients. As the population growth rate is higher than the growth in food production, future conditions may become even worse, irrespective of the potential resources within the region. Land and water resources are quite sufficient to support food production. Only 16.8% (which is about 4% of the arable land) of the potentially irrigable land has been developed for irrigated agriculture. Drainage development is almost untouched and involves only 0.4% of the agricultural area.In order to get an impression of promising options and possible constraints, with the help of the policy dialogue model PODIUM, this paper analyses the development of water management scenarios to improve food production in the region. Six sample countries - Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa and Sudan - were considered for the analysis. Three water management scenarios were considered: focus on rainfed agriculture, focus on irrigated agriculture and a mixed scenario. The results of the analysis show that, with proper water management approaches, food security in the region is achievable.

Urbanisation will be one of the 21st century's most transformative trends. By 2050, it will increase from 55% to 68%, more than doubling the urban population in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Urbanisation has multifarious (positive as well as negative) impacts on the wellbeing of humans and the environment. The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) form the blueprint to achieve a sustainable future for all. Clean Water and Sanitation is a specific goal (SDG 6) within the suite of 17 interconnected goals. Here we provide an overview of some of the challenges that urbanisation poses in relation to SDG 6, especially in developing economies. Worldwide, several cities are on the verge of water crisis. Water distribution to informal settlements or slums in megacities (e.g. >50% population in the megacities of India) is essentially non-existent and limits access to adequate safe water supply. Besides due to poor sewer connectivity in the emerging economies, there is a heavy reliance on septic tanks, and other on-site sanitation (OSS) system and by 2030, 4.9 billion people are expected to rely on OSS. About 62–93% of the urban population in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Indonesia rely on septic tanks, where septage treatment is rare. Globally, over 80% of wastewater is released to the environment without adequate treatment. About 11% of all irrigated croplands is irrigated with such untreated or poorly treated wastewater. In addition to acute and chronic health effects, this also results in significant pollution of often-limited surface and groundwater resources in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Direct and indirect water reuse plays a key role in global water and food security. Here we offer several suggestions to mitigate water and food insecurity in emerging economies.

Water and land are vital resources essential to ensuring sustainable and productive rural economies. They are also essential for safeguarding food security and socio-economic development. In spite of this, the concept of water-land-food (WLF) security nexus has generally been examined from a top-down manner with women mostly disenfranchised in the access and management of water and land in particular. Concurrently, risks linked with climate crisis aggravate gender inequalities. The limited access to resources, restricted formal rights through top-down management exacerbates the vulnerability of poor rural women. Furthermore, policy development procedures follow a sectoral approach with no account of interrelationship and interdependence between the sectors. This, directly and indirectly limits the stewardship of natural resources and mitigation of the effects of climate change. This study, therefore, examines gender roles and their implications for water, land, and food security in a changing climate through an integrative systematic review of literature in Sub-Saharan Africa. It further explains the importance to consider the nexus in adaptation. Food security and sustainable livelihoods could be ensured if women can freely and adequately access land and participate in decision-making processes.

Water scarcity is a critical issue for food production in the poor developing countries because agriculture is the primary consumer of the dwindling freshwater around the globe. This paper calls for strategies for the sustainable use of water in agriculture. Most food in the world is produced using soil moisture from precipitation - known as &ldquo;green&rdquo; water. Irrigation is the source of &ldquo;blue&rdquo; water. <br /><br />This paper analyses alternative water futures using a combined green and blue water accounting framework embedded within the water simulation components of IFPRI&rsquo;s International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT). It uses a series of scenario results to 2050 for the Limpopo and Nile River Basins, which are representative of the wide range of irrigation and rainfed agricultural conditions.<br /><br />The paper presents the following policy recommendations:<br /> an accounting framework that distinguishes between green and blue water should be included in projections to enable enhanced analysis of alternative policies for improving agricultural production in the face of growing water scarcity. to identify policy options an examination of the relative contribution of precipitation to total water consumption and that by irrigated areas can be useful. alternative investments in agricultural productivity and irrigation expansion, can lead to major water savings from both irrigation and precipitation. In the Limpopo Basin, growing water scarcity suggests the need for investment in technologies aimed at enhancing irrigated and rainfed crop yields while in the Nile Basin, the focus needs to be on expanding irrigated areas and improving rainfed crop productivity. many existing technologies should be embedded into the support and extension systems to enable new research and development addressing rainfed crop water use to benefit the rural poor in developing countries. an integrated approach for the development of strategies aimed at helping humanity adapt to climate change and increased climate variability should be adopted. The authors conclude that an approach that combines blue- and green-targeted water management strategies with other complementary rural agricultural development investments, has the potential to positively impact the lives of many poor people.

Food Security continues to be elusive in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), several decades after the first World Food Summit in 1974. The causes of food insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa include among others; poverty, economic constraints, agricultural and agronomical challenges, rapid population growth, and the effects of adverse climate change. These causes however, are linked to complex interactions, constraints and dependencies amongst the key physical resources in food systems, namely – Water, Land, Energy and Soil Nutrients (WLEN). There is limited insight on the combined impacts of the resource nexus, and how this may constrain the performance of food systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. This understanding is essential if the food challenges in the region are to be tackled sustainably.This study provides a detailed analysis of the Uganda’s 2012 WLEN nexus resources vis-à-vis the country’s current and potential food demand using calorific-demand analysis and source-to-service resource transformation modelling. The analysis determines estimates of the current resource stresses within Uganda’s insufficient food system and the interconnected resource implications for the achievement of food security by 2050. The results are visualised using Sankey diagrams. The inferences highlight evident limits across all four resources. Overall, the analysis helps to inform food security policy and the resource context for the present and future management of Uganda’s food system.

Despite efforts to achieve food security in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the 1970s, food insufficiency continues to plague the region. As of 2014 more than a fifth of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population remain food insecure according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). The food security challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa are linked to economic, agro-ecological, technological/agronomic, institutional and related factors. These causes however overlay complex interactions and constraints within the key physical resources of Water Land and Energy (WLE), which are necessary for food production, processing, distribution and consumption. The relationship between the WLE interactions and the performance of SSA’s food systems, and the impacts of interventions at different scales are not yet fully understood, particularly in light of the need to maintain essential ecosystem services.This study employs an integrated multi-scale Food System resource analysis approach to examine Uganda’s WLE resource constraints vis-à-vis 2012 and 2050 agricultural resource demand at national, district and local scales, as a test case for Sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis identifies where the competing WLE resource constraints are and the variations from local (sub-county), regional, to national scale so that potential policy interventions can be appropriately targeted. The approach involves a combination of geo-spatial analysis, calorific-demand analysis and Source-to-Service resource transformation modelling. The results are visualised using coupled Sankey diagrams and resource stress maps. The analysis reveals the current competing demands and constraints at different scales, and helps to identify key resource intervention areas to resolve resource stress in Uganda’s food system. The inferences highlight variations in the significance of resource stress at different analytical resolutions and constraints at different locations for the WLE resources. Overall, the analysis helps to inform food security policy and the resource context for the present and future management of Uganda’s food system.

The relationship between food-energy-water resources and agricultural sustainability has got a significant policy attraction that generally in favor of livelihood of the poor, which is largely affected by climate change, food security challenges, poor access of water resources, and less access of electricity. These challenges generally faced by less developing countries, while Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries has no exemption to escape out from this food-water-energy poverty nexus due to inadequate socio-economic and environmental action programs of sustainable development. This study examined the dynamic nexus between agricultural sustainability and food-energy-water poverty in a panel of selected SSA countries over the period of 1980–2013. The study used pooled least squares regression, pooled fixed effects, and pooled random effects regression techniques to absorb country-specific-time-variant shocks. The Hausman (1978) test results reveal that country-specific shocks influence the food-energy-water poverty model; therefore, the fixed effects regression results are consider a better fit model than that of the pooled random effect model. The overall results conclude that agricultural value added, cereal yields and forest area significantly decreases food-energy-water poverty nexus, leading to higher economic growth and price levels at the cost of environmental degradation. In general, agricultural sustainability is the prerequisite for reducing food-energy-water poverty.

Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) faces twin challenges of water stress and food insecurity – challenges that are already pressing and are projected to grow. Sub‐Saharan Africa comprises 43 % arid and semi‐arid area, which is projected to increase due to climate change. Small‐scale, rainfed agriculture is the main livelihood source in arid and semi‐arid areas of SSA. Because rainfed agriculture constitutes more than 95 % of agricultural land use, water scarcity is a major limitation to production. Crop production, specifically staple cereal crop production, will have to adapt to water scarcity and improved water productivity (output per water input) to meet food requirements. We propose inclusion and promotion of drought‐tolerant cereal crops in arid and semi‐arid agro‐ecological zones of SSA where water scarcity is a major limitation to cereal production. Sorghum uniquely fits production in such regions, due to high and stable water‐use efficiency, drought and heat tolerance, high germplasm variability, comparative nutritional value and existing food value chain in SSA. However, sorghum is socio‐economically and geographically underutilized in parts of SSA. Sorghum inclusion and/or promotion in arid and semi‐arid areas of SSA, especially among subsistence farmers, will improve water productivity and food security.

In this study, the suitability of an anaerobic biofilter (AnBF) as an efficient and low-cost wastewater treatment for safer irrigation water production for Sub-Saharan Africa was investigated. To determine the influence of different ubiquitous available materials on the treatment efficiency of the AnBF, rice husks and their pyrolysed equivalent, rice husk biochar, were used as filtration media and compared with sand as a common reference material. Raw sewage from a municipal full-scale wastewater treatment plant pretreated with an anaerobic filter (AF) was used in this experiment. The filters were operated at 22 °C room temperature with a hydraulic loading rate of 0.05 m·h−1 for 400 days. The mean organic loading rate (OLR) of the AF was 194 ± 74 and 63 ± 16 gCOD·m−3·d−1 for the AnBF. Fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) (up to 3.9 log10-units), bacteriophages (up to 2.7 log10-units), chemical oxygen demand (COD) (up to 94%) and turbidity (up to 97%) could be significantly reduced. Additionally, the essential plant nutrients nitrogen and phosphorous were not significantly affected by the water treatment. Overall, the performance of the biochar filters was significantly better than or equal to the sand and rice husk filters. By using the treated wastewater for irrigating lettuce plants in a pot experiment, the contamination with FIB was >2.5 log-units lower (for most of the plants below the detection limit of 5.6 MPN per gram fresh weight) than for plants irrigated with raw wastewater. Respective soil samples were minimally contaminated and nearly in the same range as that of tap water.

Environmental sustainability agenda are generally compromised by energy, water, and food production resources, while in the recent waves of global financial crisis, it mediates to increase the intensity of air pollutants, which largely affected the less developing countries due to their ease of environmental regulation policies and lack of optimal utilization of economic resources. Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are no exception that majorly hit by the recent global financial crisis, which affected the country’s natural environment through the channel of unsustainable energy-water-food production. The study employed panel random effect model that addresses the country-specific time-invariant shocks to examine the non-linear relationship between water-energy-food resources and air pollutants in a panel of 19 selected SSA countries, for a period of 2000–2014. The results confirmed the carbon-fossil-methane environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that turned into inverted U-shaped relationships in a panel of selected SSA countries. Food resources largely affected greenhouse gas (GHG), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions while water resource decreases carbon dioxide (CO₂), fossil fuel, and CH₄ emissions in a region. Energy efficiency improves air quality indicators while industry value added increases CO₂ emissions, fossil fuel energy, and GHG emissions. Global financial crisis increases the risk of climate change across countries. The study concludes that although SSA countries strive hard to take some “good” initiatives to reduce environmental degradation in a form of improved water and energy sources, however, due to lack of optimal utilization of food resources and global financial constraints, it leads to “the bad” and “the ugly” sustainability reforms in a region.