New Map Shows Where Africa's Water Goes, and Who It Never Reaches

Researchers at the International Water Management Institute have estimated Africa's water demand sector by sector across the whole continent, a breakdown the paper says had not been mapped in detail before. Davy Vanham and colleagues put total demand for 2020 at 347 cubic kilometers a year, with irrigated farming taking 225 cubic kilometers of that, or 65%.

The assessment, published in Nature on Oct. 28, 2026, is offered as a baseline for finding where demand presses hardest and where people cannot reach a supply, "rather than establishing a new causal mechanism of water insecurity." The authors write that the figures should be read as harmonized estimates and not as direct observations of water actually used.

Demand grew 26% between 2010 and 2020, the paper reports. Towns and cities came second to irrigation, ahead of electricity generation, manufacturing, livestock and mining. Egypt has the highest national demand, followed by Nigeria, Sudan and Morocco.

The authors also counted who can turn on a tap: 717 million Africans had no piped water at home. What that group needs is largely absent from official water-use statistics, which record the water people draw rather than the water they would use if it reached them.

How demand sits against supply varies sharply by region. In parts of northern and southern Africa the estimated demand exceeds the water available, the authors report, though that comparison shifts with how much water is reserved for rivers and wetlands. Elsewhere there is more water than demand and still no pipe to carry it: "physical availability alone does not determine water security."

Only open-access input data went into the assessment, and the datasets behind it are posted on Zenodo. The paper itself is open access.