City Blueprint assessments in five African cities

In 2019 and 2020 UNESCO and KWR have collaborated to test the usefulness of the City Blueprint Approach in cities across Africa through local young professionals affiliated with UNESCO. For this purpose six young professionals have assessed their city according to the City Blueprint approach: 1. Humphrey Ozoani representing the city of Abuja, Nigeria 2. Vanessa Grekonzy representing the city of Bangui, Central African Republic 3. Tariro Marekwa and Georgina Mukwirimba representing the city of Harare, Zimbabwe 4. Gwladis Ovenga representing the city of Libreville, Gabon 5. Ibrahima Abdoulahi representing the city of Yaoundé, Cameroon.
The results of their assessments are provided in this report. An extensive interpretation of the results, revision for methodological tailoring for the African context and the identification of next steps for expanding this initiative will be provided in a separate report (in August 2020). In this report also provides a full governance capacity analysis of the city of Libreville and Yaoundé.
In this report, the results of the first two frameworks, the Trends and Pressures Framework (TPF) and the City Blueprint performance Framework (CBF) will be provided. TPF represent social, environmental and financial factors on which local water managers have a negligible influence but that can impact water management performances as measured by the TPF. This distinction between pressures and water management performances is essential in identifying context-relevant solution priorities. For example, a city situated in an arid area may not necessarily experience water stress due to overconsumption, but simply due to the low natural availability of fresh water. In this case, water consumption or the use of water saving techniques are performance indicators, whereas the natural availability of fresh water is a descriptive indicator belonging to the TPF.