Between demographic growth, climate variability and intensifying uses, Senegal's water resource calls for genuinely integrated management. An overview of the challenges and levers for action.
Water availability underpins Senegal's health, agriculture and economic development. Yet the resource, long considered abundant, proves unevenly distributed and increasingly stressed.
A resource under pressure
Urban demand is soaring around Dakar and regional hubs, while irrigation accounts for most abstraction. In parallel, aquifer recharge depends on increasingly erratic rainfall.
This combination creates local over-abstraction, with falling piezometric levels and, on the coast, saline intrusion into coastal aquifers.
Understand the resource before exploiting it
Any sustainable strategy begins with rigorous characterisation: aquifer geometry, genuinely renewable volumes and vulnerability to pollution. This is the foundation of any credible master plan.
- Inventory and piezometric monitoring of water points
- Water balances by basin and aquifer
- Geophysics (ERT, TDEM) to delineate reservoirs
- Flow modelling (MODFLOW / FEFLOW)
“You can only manage well what you measure: without a lasting monitoring network, water management remains navigation by sight.”
Towards integrated management
Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) aligns uses, territories and stakeholders around a shared balance. It requires shared data, transparent allocation rules and basin-scale governance.
The role of scientific expertise
EAU-GEF supports institutions and funders from diagnosis to decision, combining fieldwork, modelling and skills transfer to make stakeholders self-sufficient over the long term.
