How to write about "Water and Politics"

 

    Hi!

    My first post aims to introduce you to a little bit of who I am and why I chose the theme “Water and Politics”. I am an affiliate student at UCL in the Economics department and my home university is Sciences Po Paris so the thematic choice was obvious. During my first two years at Sciences Po, I studied in the Europe-Africa program on the Reims campus and started learning Swahili! I am therefore particularly curious to learn more about the issue of water in the East African region and I am very interested in this course which intersects all my interests by analyzing the African continent under the prism of development! During my second year at Sciences Po, Benjamin Marx's course "Economics of Development" was my first introduction to understanding the specific economic challenges of developing countries, revealing to me the full extent of the continent's potential for growth and influence.

    The theme "Water and Politics" appealed to me from the outset because, in my opinion, it is the broadest and allows me to cross-reference the other themes: sanitation, gender, food and environmental change, because everything is ultimately political! So I aim to make my blog as varied and heterogeneous as possible and not to follow a guideline on a particular sub-theme.

    I would like to look at the way governments deal with the water challenge and better understand after these weeks of study this issue which is impossible to transpose in Europe where we know water abundance and where most of us have lost the good habit of saving it. I would like to deconstruct the global vision of Africa as a continent where only hungry and thirsty people live, but I would like to make my remarks more nuanced in order to better understand the heterogeneity of this immense continent composed of 54 countries.

    I also have the desire to take inspiration from the tone of the article (Binyavanga Wainaina, How to Write About Africa, 2006) that Professor Richard G. Taylor asked us to read during the first week of this module (which is actually fascinating!) in order to move away from my preconceived ideas and take a fresh look at the innovative political strategies that countries in Africa have devised in order to alleviate water shortages. I would like to give many examples in my articles to avoid falling into the general truth that globalizes Africa and to illustrate my remarks in the manner of Esther Duflo and Abhijit V. Banerjee in their masterpiece Poor Economics. A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2012) which I read with great interest. Feel free to comment on my posts and enjoy reading!

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