Resilience Study of Water Supply System in Freetown of Sierra Leone

Providing safe and adequate drinking water to the growing city of Freetown in Sierra Leone under changing climatic conditions is a challenging task. Despite naturally available water, the freshwater availability is very much limited. The growing demand for water supply in the city is facing tough competition for various uses like food production, industrial requirements, and other domestic requirements. This has led to a mismatch between the supply and demand and has built up pressures on the freshwater sources like Guma, Charlotte, Kongo, and Takayama. Further, the poor water policy, weak public sectors, inadequate water management laws, and institutional framework have led to the degradation of water supply infrastructure in this capital city. In order to preserve the water ecosystems and biodiversity as well as to take up the challenges of climate change, it is desired to explore sustainable water supply sources and to check the resilience of the existing system. Keeping this in mind, the present study focuses on assessing the resilience of the existing system and identifies the factors that affect the same. In order to augment the resilience of the system, the study explores the issue of supply and demand management. It advocates the integrated water supply management (IWRM) for an efficient and effective resilient water supply system for the city of Freetown.