page_title: Water supply and sanitation in Namibia
section_title: Surface water
hierarchical_section_title: Water supply and sanitation in Namibia / Water resources / Surface water
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Hardap Dam near Mariental, Hardap Region, Namibia
context_page_description: Namibia is an arid country that is regularly afflicted by droughts. Large rivers flow only along its Northern and Southern border, but they are far from the population centers. They are also far from the country's mines, which are large water users. In order to confront this challenge the country has built dams to capture the flow from ephemeral rivers, constructed pipelines to transport water over large distances, pioneered potable water reuse in its capital Windhoek located in the central part of Namibia, and built Sub-Saharan Africa's first large seawater desalination plant to supply a uranium mine and the city of Swakopmund with water. A large scheme to bring water from the Okavango River in the North to Windhoek, the Eastern National Water Carrier, was only partially completed during the 1980s.
  Most urban residents have access to drinking water supply, but access lags behind in rural areas. Access to sanitation also considerably lags behind access to drinking water supply. The bulk water supply infrastructure is owned by NamWater, a public entity operating under commercial principles.
context_section_description: Many of the ephemeral (=seasonally flowing) rivers of the Namibian interior are dammed and, according to the FAO, provide a 95%-assured yield of 96 million m³/year, based on historical rainfall data. These dams have low safe yields in comparison to their total volume, because of uneven flows over time and high evaporation losses. Thus only about half the water from ephemeral rivers is usable. There  is  surplus  water  in  some dams, e.g. in the Oanob Dam, the Hardap Dam, the Naute Dam and the Friedenau Dam. This surplus water cannot be used because of the remote location of these dams and the comparatively limited local demand.
  Namibia suffers from regular droughts, the most recent one hitting the country in 2015/16.
  The water from perennial (=permanently flowing) rivers used in Namibia corresponds to the small share of Namibia in its border rivers. The actual abstractions as of 1999 (latest available data) were 23 million m³ from the Cunene River at Ruacana, 49 million m³ from the Orange River at Noordoewer, 22 million m³ from the Okavango River (that flows through Namibia in the Caprivi Strip) at Rundu, and 7 million m³ from the Zambezi River. Namibia has agreements in place with Angola and South Africa about the sharing of the Cunene and Orange Rivers respectively. The water allocation from the Cunene River is 180 million m³ and thus far larger than the amount withdrawn.
caption: The reservoir of the Hardap Dam on the ephemeral Fish River in Southern Namibia is the largest in the country.
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