Senegal Water Security Project

Adaptation Need

Senegal faces critical water security and sanitation challenges driven by climate change, including variable rainfall, scarcity, and infrastructure degradation. With demand for drinking water and irrigation already exceeding available resources, it is essential to diversify water sources while reducing losses, enhancing efficiency, ensuring fit-for-purpose allocation, and developing nonconventional resources like wastewater reuse. Treated wastewater presents a viable irrigation solution, increasing agricultural resilience to droughts and saline intrusion while freeing freshwater for domestic uses. However, this approach requires improved understanding of associated climate risks, particularly freshwater contamination, and identification of institutional pathways that facilitate project development, implementation, and maintenance. Gaps in policy, institutional capacity, and regulatory frameworks further limit scaling of necessary adaptation measures.

GCA’s Added Value

During the first phase of the program GCA will conduct climate risk assessments for proposed wastewater irrigation, improving understanding of urban climate risks and identifying suitable treated wastewater reuse options with intervention design guidelines. Suitable adaptation measures will be outlined for identified risks, with promising interventions replicated in later phases. A Policy Institutional and Regulatory review will identify pathways supporting scaled treated wastewater reuse for irrigation across administrative boundaries. All lessons and tools will be documented for scaling and replication in subsequent phases of the MPA.