Peo­ple who have fled Soma­lia into the refugee camps in Yemen are expe­ri­enc­ing a severe short­age of water. What few wells are avail­able to the camp’s inhab­i­tants have mostly become con­t­a­m­i­nated, so the UN Refugee Agency is try­ing to clean the wells up.

From the IRIN, we read more about the water crisis.

Pub­lic access to water in Basateen, a slum on the out­skirts of Yemen’s south­ern port city of Aden and home to some 16,000 Somali refugees, has become extremely lim­ited, accord­ing to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

The slum’s Somali inhab­i­tants, most of whom if employed do menial jobs, say they have to pur­chase water from pri­vate com­pa­nies to meet their daily needs.

Accord­ing to Hadiga Ali Sayid from the Adven­tist Devel­op­ment and Relief Agency, an inter­na­tional NGO pro­mot­ing health and pro­vid­ing food and water, many poor refugee fam­i­lies who are unable to buy water rely on char­ity from local mosques to survive.

“I get 20,000 Yemeni riyals [US$100] a month work­ing as a cleaner, and one load of water from a pri­vate com­pany costs 1,500 riyals [about $7.5],” said Amina Mohamed, a Somali refugee who has been liv­ing in Basateen for 15 years.

She told IRIN that pay­ing for water is dif­fi­cult for her and the 20 other mem­bers of her extended fam­ily liv­ing under the same roof. Amina’s uncle, a taxi dri­ver, is the only other income earner in the fam­ily. Their house has no pub­lic water supply.

In the early 1990s, Yemeni returnees from Soma­lia and Somali nation­als flee­ing con­flict began to set­tle in Basateen. A well-irrigated sub­urb 25 years ago — reflect­ing its name which means “gar­dens” in Ara­bic — Basateen is now a slum and, accord­ing to the UNHCR, the poor­est dis­trict in Aden city.

Josef Mueller, UNHCR’s water and san­i­ta­tion expert, said access to water in the slum was “lim­ited” both in terms of quan­tity and qual­ity, and some of the pri­vately owned wells had become pol­luted with sewage.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and UNHCR are work­ing with the author­i­ties to chlo­ri­nate all 18 wells in Basateen to avoid an out­break of water-borne diseases.

Accord­ing to the 2006 Human Devel­op­ment Report enti­tled Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Cri­sis by the UN Devel­op­ment Pro­gramme (UNDP), Yemen has one of the world’s low­est fresh­wa­ter avail­abil­ity lev­els — 198 cubic metres per per­son. The country’s pop­u­la­tion is pro­jected to dou­ble by 2025 to some 40 mil­lion, and per capita avail­abil­ity of water could fall by a third, the report said.

Water riots

In August 2009, seri­ous water short­ages led to riots and the death of one per­son in Aden, accord­ing to local media.

The Yemen Times news­pa­per, said 75 per­cent of Aden’s water sup­ply was re-directed to the cities of Zun­jubar and Ja’ar three months prior to the riots because of water crises in those cities.

Deputy Director-General of the Aden Water Cor­po­ra­tion Saeed H. Qassem blamed the prob­lem on ran­dom well dig­ging in the city. “We have con­stantly raised the mat­ter… but no one would lis­ten and the result is the present sit­u­a­tion in Aden,” he was quoted by Yemen Times as saying.

Basateen’s water prob­lems are unlikely to dis­ap­pear until Aden’s water sup­ply sit­u­a­tion is reme­died, Mueller said.

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