This report builds on WRI’s research and urban water resilience work in Africa which spans five years of deep engagements on the ground, from 2020 to 2025. Applied with partners, the Urban Water Resilience (UWR) approach supported cities from the initial research stage to quantitative and qualitative analysis, to action planning and development of a project pipeline, to on-the-ground implementation, and finally preparing project concepts for scaling thought additional funding and financing.

This publication examines the discussions and actions that resulted, thanks in part to city actors from different sectors and departments coming together to the same table to strategize around evidence-based priorities and action, and to identify funding and financial resources to implement solutions. The authors highlight common themes across the participating cities, including shared priorities, barriers, and enabling conditions.

Local partners played a vital role in engaging city government stakeholders and fostering a collaborative process that strengthened local ownership and led to clear city commitments. The approach was undertaken in Addis Ababa & Dire Dawa, Ethiopia; Kigali & Musanze, Rwanda; and Johannesburg & Gqeberha, South Africa. Implementation lessons across

all cities emphasize the need to tackle water issues from a basin-level scale, leveraging frameworks to break down department silos, ensuring diverse and consistent stakeholder engagement, and identifying the most critical priorities shared amongst different stakeholders to use as engagement points going forward. Recommendations call for water

management across water-using sectors; fostering trust-based partnerships; aligning policies, engagements, and tools connecting local and national levels; improving data systems; and mobilizing stakeholders for consensus-based high-priority projects.

Key Findings

  1. Integrated and watershed-level planning is difficult to execute yet necessary to effectively tackle the root causes of cities’ water challenges.
  2. Frameworks can help break down silos and bring together different departments, but are not enough to overcome existing mandates and government systems.
  3. The UWR approach was especially helpful and valuable for secondary cities’ planning and furthering commitments for implementation.
  4. Diverse, continuous, and participatory stakeholder engagement enhances alignment and sustainability.
  5. City-led stakeholder engagement approaches must create spaces to both recognize a diversity of perspectives, including those that are less dominant, and develop consensus-based solutions.
  6. Based on this experience, it is recommended that primary data collection include topics such as social norms, power dynamics, intersection vulnerability, and water insecurity.
  7. Developing robust monitoring of key hazards and accessible data-sharing systems emerged as a foundational requirement for evidence-based decision-making and investment.
  8. Beyond identifying main challenges and priorities, a lesson involving the UWR approach was to take the process one step further and identify, via stakeholder consensus, the most critical of these priorities to use as engagement points to sustain action going forward.

Executive Summary

Insufficient strategic urban planning for fast-growing African cities, paired with other critical challenges such as limited city water budgets has resulted in the loss of protection for most water resources, stripping away the ability to cope with too much (e.g., flooding) or too little (e.g., drought), and too dirty water (e.g., water pollution). This has significant impacts beyond a city’s water sector, weakening protections for public health and critical sectors such as infrastructure, transportation, energy, industry, and agriculture. Moreover, large swaths of the population—especially people living in urban poverty—are still living without safe, affordable, and reliable access to water and sanitation.

To ensure long-term water resilience, cities urgently need new approaches that connect local realities such as unequal service provision or aging infrastructure, all the way to basin-level issues, linking crosscutting urban issues like climate impacts and land use. The integrated approach proposed in this report is important because it reduces the risk of treating urban water issues in isolation, enabling better decision-making, resource management, and investment outcomes.

The Urban Water Resilience approach was developed with cross-sector stakeholders to address water-related issues through research, spatial analysis, technical analysis, and capacity building. WRI’s partners, Arup and the Resilient Cities Network, played a critical role in implementing the approach, utilizing the methodology developed through the City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA) to guide and facilitate the Assessment and Visioning workshop processes in each city. They also supported the development of the resulting City Characterization Reports, City Water Resilience Profiles, and Action Plans. Partner organizations comprised the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC), Haramaya University, Bantu Design, Rwanda Young Water Professionals, Zutari and the South African Cities Network.

This publication is intended for city government decisionmakers and public authorities in Africa, as well as officials in cities elsewhere facing comparable urban water resilience challenges; water and sanitation utilities; staff and experts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in city partnerships and issues; the private sector; as well as urban water resilience researchers, international development partners, and academia.