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IWMI interview: “Water and Soil Accelerator for agri and the Limpopo Basin Digital Twin Project”

Exclusive interview with Dr Henry Roman, Regional Representative: Southern Africa at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

Interview Summary:

Dr Henry Roman, IWMI’s Regional Representative for Southern Africa, emphasises the organisation’s vision of a water‑secure world achieved through evidence‑based policy, innovation and partnerships. He highlights projects such as the Water and Soil Accelerator, supporting smallholder farmers in Zambia and Malawi, and the Digital Twin of the Limpopo basin, which integrates diverse data, including citizen science, to guide water management.

Dr Roman warns of severe climate‑driven challenges, drought and underinvestment, urging cross‑sectoral cooperation. He stresses the private sector’s vital role, advocates balance between human, industrial and ecological needs, and calls for equitable access, particularly addressing the burdens faced by women and girls.

Thank you for joining us. Please can we start with some background on you, your role at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the organisation’s goals.

Good day, everybody. My name is Henry Roman. I am the country representative for South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as the regional representative for the International Water Management Institute for Southern Africa. IWMI, as we call it, has as a vision a water secure world, and in order to get there, we deliver evidence policy and solutions that enable scale and accelerate outcomes for water security. So, working beyond the research and looking at implementation as well.

Some background on myself: before joining IWMI, I was working for the government of South Africa for a little over a decade where I worked on various topics including climate change, water as well as waste, solid waste, not wastewater. Wastewater was under water. So yes, quite a varied career. I’ve been a consultant in the past as well to mining. So have a bit of experience across different scales of water implementation projects as well as research in water.

Tell us more about the projects you are involved in.

At IWMI, we work on solutions for water security problems, working through research, through innovation, and importantly, through partnerships. We have a very particular focus on water for food, water and nature, inclusion and poverty reduction. And then lastly, we also look at climate action and resilience with a water lens.

We work across the global south. We work with governments. We work with communities and partners to enable them to make smart decisions about water, food, and energy. We see water as that blue thread across different sectors that brings everything together. I’m going to quickly unpack two big projects that are currently happening in the region. One is the water and soil accelerator, which is taking place in Zambia and in Malawi. And here we’re looking at rain-fed agriculture and how to make that form of agriculture more climate resilient. We’re working with various parties, including the farmers themselves. So we focus on smallholder farmers and on how we can make them more productive, especially with climate impacts on water. And as we know, the recent drought of 2024 really hit the region very hard with a number of countries in southern Africa declaring emergencies and disasters during that time.

The other project we’re working on is the Digital Twin Project in the Limpopo Basin. What we’re doing in this particular project is working with the four countries that comprise the basin: Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and we’re building a digital twin. A digital twin is a virtual representation of the real world that we live in, and we’re building it across the entire basin. So it’s quite an ambitious project.

As far as we know, it’s one of the biggest basin twins that is being developed at this point in time. And the digital twin incorporates a whole set of data regarding climate forecasting, hydrological data, flow data and citizen science data, which is a new aspect we’ve brought into this. And the reason for that is we don’t always have access to data in the areas we’re working in. We don’t have telemetry or internet of things that we can place everywhere that can collect and send this data into the cloud so we can collect it. So we make use of Earth observation data, on the one hand, and we’ve introduced the citizen science data because we can utilise what is known as MiniSSAS, which is a UN-accredited technique to gather data for river health. And here we work with local organisations like Ground Truth and Award in training the trainers, as we call it, to train people in communities on the MiniSSAS system and other citizen science tools whereby the citizens themselves follow a relatively easy methodology. It can be on paper, and we’ve developed aa mobile app for it as well. And using insects that you find in the water, you can determine whether that water is in pristine condition or if it’s highly impacted with pollutants. And that’s a good first pass using the insects that are present because they are known as indicator species. And then if you find that the water is highly impacted, you can send out a team that can look at the water quality from a chemical perspective.

They also look at things like stream flow, determining the stream flow, what velocity the water is flowing at. You can look at the turbidity, which is also an indicator that can be used for river health. And these systems are very easy to understand and easy to implement. And therefore, we spent some time across the four countries training the trainers so that we can extend this further than our own reach, ultimately. And governments in the four countries had representatives that were present at the training as well to highlight to them what the impact of this data would be. And then that data is taken up into the twin and assists the twin’s ultimate aim, to be used as a decision support tool for governments or for managers that have to make decisions around water allocations. So yes, those are the two big projects happening in the region at this point in time.

What are the main challenges that the continent is facing with regards to its water resources in climate change conditions?

The challenges on the continent in terms of water resources and climate change impacts, all the predictions are pointing to a very large increase in temperature across the continent. And in southern Africa in particular, we’re looking at whatever the global average increase is, you can add two degrees Celsius on top of that, which tells us that in the future we’re going to have a really big problem regarding climate. So what does that mean to water resources? A lot of the water resources we use are surface water. Therefore, surface water will be impacted because the warming temperatures leads to greater evapotranspiration losses, especially on surface bodies.

And as an example, if you look across the world, 50% of the large lakes worldwide have lost water since the early 1990s. So they’ve decreased in size since then. The problem with that is that 25% of the world’s population are directly dependent on those lakes. So you can see there’s already an impact.

Then if you’re looking at water as an economic factor, I don’t think it’s actually provided sufficient attention as an economic factor. If you look at fiscal budgets, they are insufficient

when it comes to water infrastructure, or water services, and raising finance to protect water resources and then for water security. It’s not that easy as well. And if you look at it, there are 3 billion people worldwide living in areas of declining water storage or unstable water supply. to make matters even worse, 50% of global food is produced in the areas with declining storage of water. And then if you look at our region in southern Africa, there are 15 basins that are shared between countries.

Cooperation across countries to manage water strategically is critical, as water can be that catalyst for interconnected solutions across energy and food, and water is an economic opportunity. So therefore, if you take those factors into account, water demands prioritisation at every level of the decision making process. South Africa, that would be at national, at provincial, at local government levels. You need water to be prioritised across and not just prioritised within your Department of Water and Sanitation, but across your Department of Trade and Industry, for example. Industry cannot function without water. They have a vested interest in ensuring that water is secure. So looking at that, integrated actions are required to address both water and food security. Integrated actions are required for nature conservation and climate change. So in our case, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment should work very closely with the Department of Water and Sanitation on policies and regulations to protect our water sources. And then if you integrate between different departments, different organisations, this should put us on a path to a just and sustainable future.

Lastly, looking at drought. Drought is an ever-present crisis in our region. If you look recently in the news, Cape Town is again facing water shortages. Many parts of South Africa are facing either shortages of water due to climate impacts or due to infrastructure finally breaking down. And current estimated costs to the world of droughts is sitting at around USD 307 billion annually. That’s a very large number and the impact of that is great. As I said, quite a number of countries have declared disasters in 2024 due to the drought. And if you look at Zambia, that interconnectedness between water and energy was starkly felt because I think it’s 80% of Zambia’s power is supplied through hydro power. So when the drought hit, they’ve been suffering from load shedding on a large scale. And in South Africa, we had it perfectly timed, certain times a day, etc., certain hours, depending on the levels. There it was up to points where you had maybe sometimes even just 30 minutes of power in a day. So you can see the impact and that interconnectedness really coming.

And in terms of drought, IWMI is leading on platforms and networks that drive climate resilience. And one of these is what we’ve termed the Drought Action Catalyst, which is a partnership, not just IWMI, it’s a partnership of various organisations. And this is to bring a solution to knowledge fragmentation. It’s also an open invitation to partners and countries to enhance drought management at national levels as well.

PPAs in the African water sector have seen mixed success. What are your views on what the private sector can contribute to this field?

As I said, private sector has a role to play. There’s an incident I can relate of a company that was going to put down a factory in Cape Town and then the day zero impact came. The result of which is the company decided that they cannot put a factory in Cape Town at that time because they had no security of supply in terms of water.

So in terms of that, those public-private partnerships really are critical if we want to solve the problem of water security. And if you’re looking in South Africa, where we will face a deficit in terms of demand versus supply as early as 2030, we don’t have a lot of time to put in place modalities or solutions that will help us to at least mitigate that risk that we face. if you add climate impacts on top of that predicted, because climate is one of the factors

within that deficit, we really don’t have a lot of time to work on that. And private sector has a great role to play, as was actually demonstrated in Cape Town itself, in mitigating the risk of day zero where private sector actually came in quite strongly and helped to mitigate that day zero from actually taking place. However, when the crisis is passed then all these good things that were being done to avert the crisis also is passed.

So, we need to find ways, I think, of how we can maintain that relationship with private sector and the understanding of private sector of their critical role within water security.

What is your vision for the water sector?

My vision for the water sector is that there is sufficient water for all our activities, be it for human consumption, industrial development and nature. We must never forget that nature itself requires water, even though we depend on it for our water. If we’re destroying natural systems, like wetlands as an example, we are actually increasing the risk of water quality and quantity to ourselves. So if you look at it from that perspective, understanding how nature contributes to our water supply, but also how we have a responsibility to maintain nature and to discharge water of a good quality in order to maintain ecosystems and finding that balance between what we require for economic growth and what nature requires to maintain the planet. That balance is critical. So my vision would be how do we find that middle ground so that we reverse some of the detrimental impacts we’ve had on nature and start helping it to rehabilitate itself.

Thank you again for joining us. Any final thoughts you would like to share?

My final thoughts are also part of a vision for the water sector, if you look at the fact that globally, more than one billion women and girls lack access to safely managed drinking water services. We all know the example of women walking kilometres to find water and then carrying it back, you know, it’s not the most ideal situation and they do put themselves at risk in doing so as well. And if you look at the fact that women spend three times more time than men in collecting water, if you look and a study was done across 53 countries, that amounts to 250 million hours per day that women and girls spend collecting water. We need to look at equitable access. We need to understand also the cultural norms at play so that when we develop methodologies for equitable access, we do it in a much more inclusive manner when with proper understanding.

Also, in IWMI, we have a unit that directly looks at these issues. It’s termed the Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Unit. And all our projects have to put the gender lens on, as well as the social inclusivity lens. So for us, by embedding gender analysis, into water data systems, decision-making tools and policy processes, in that way is helping to ensure that water interventions are equitable, accountable and effective. And importantly, trying to deliver sustainable outcomes for all.