Infrastructure leakages account for 30 percent of the water loss in some areas in Botswana, the Minister of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources, Kitso Mokaila, told Parliament recently.In addition, the Botswana Water Sector Policy Brief of 2012, which was compiled by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), pegs unaccounted water losses and wastage of purified water at 46 percent.
Presenting on Climate Change and its Linkages to Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at the University of Botswana last year, the chief advisor UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative in Botswana, Ruud Jansen, noted that in Maun, "out of every five litres of water supplied, one litre comes out of the tap, four litres disappear in the system". Shortage of water in Maun, the country's tourism breadbasket, is a tragic normal, one that people there have lived with for a number of years now. But this is a long running countrywide crisis. Statistics Botswana figures show that since the early 1990s, Kanye, Ramotswa, Serowe and Molepolole have been losing high amounts of water. This is what a snapshot of unaccounted water losses looks like: 62 percent in Serowe by 2005, 57 percent in Ramotswa by 2004, 45 percent in Molepolole by 2002 and 43 percent in Kanye by 2007. In his instructive 2011 paper, a Survey of Water Losses - The Case of Ramotswa Village in Botswana, Ezekiel Kholoma presents a perfect study in how water authorities failed to control water loss. He found that about 30 percent to 60 percent of treated water continued to be lost from the distribution system from 1990 to the early 2000s in Ramotswa.
