"When I first came here, there was only a forest with lots of wild
animals, including lions," recalls Chairman Juma Omar Shindo, one
of the earliest migrants to what became one of the largest urban
sprawls in Tanzania's main city, Dar es Salaam. "All the forest
belonged to missionaries then and what dwellings there were, were
scattered far and wide."

It's hard to imagine such a scene from just over 50 years ago
sitting in a tiny open office on a narrow dusty street in a small
corner of the ever-growing Mbagala area.

Although Chairman Juma, a street leader for the neighbourhood of
Bughdada, remembers people starting to build homes from the late
1950's in locations that are now fashionable parts of Dar es
Salaam, it wasn't until the 1980's that he really noticed
significant migration from Tanzania's rural areas.

"Up until then, there was no infrastructure. No roads, very few
schools and clinics. There was no transport so people had to walk
far. It would take us two days to walk to the hospital where there
was only one doctor. Water, we would buy from a pump but then we
paid cents, now we pay in shillings," he reminisces.

Decades later, there are still issues over lack of
infrastructure, particularly clinics, dispensaries and schools. But
although these refrains are repeated by residents across Mbagala,
the most common one is for water in a city unable to meet the
demands of a rapidly growing population.

Mbagala alone has an estimated population of about 200,000
though nobody really knows. Ninety per cent of its residents are
migrants from other parts of the country.

The story is similar elsewhere in Dar es Salaam. It's rare to
come across anyone in the city that is actually from there.
Officially, the former Tanzanian capital has a population of about
2.7 million people but it's widely estimated to be above 4 million
and rising.

Mary, a social worker who came from Kilimanjaro region 10 years
ago, has to get her water from a well 500 m from her home. Each
bucket she carries back costs her 30 Tanzanian shillings (US 3
cents per bucket).

"Getting water now is so much more difficult than before. Then
we used to have piped water coming to the house. We used to pay
8,000 shillings a month for it. Then it stopped coming," she says.
She thinks the pipe infrastructure broke down and was never
repaired. Like many others, she buys her water from someone who has
dug a well with no checks on the quality of the water she and
others are using.

Anna, who came to Dar es Salaam nearly two years ago with her
husband and children after they could no longer scrape a living
growing and selling vegetables in Tabora, western Tanzania, can at
best only afford five buckets of water a day.

With a husband unable to work and in poor health and the family
of five living in one tiny room with no electricity, Anna struggles
to keep the family afloat. Five buckets of water at a total cost of
15 US cents a day for drinking, washing and cooking in a country
where millions of people are living on less than one dollar a day
is a significant amount of money.

In plush areas of the city including the diplomatic
neighbourhood, where the cost of water is not so much of an issue,
water has to be trucked in.

Demand for water is about 450,000 cubic metres a day, but the
Dar es Salaam Water and Sewerage Authority (DAWASA) that supplies
the city can only provide 270,000 cubic metres.

According to its Chief Operation Officer Jackson Midala, the
authority had previously predicted a population growth of 3 per
cent a year for the city. Instead, the current growth is 8 per
cent.

It's dependent on its supplies on surface and underground
sources, primarily two water treatment centres along the River
Ruvu.

But the river doesn't have the amount of water it used to have
and its flows are less reliable than they used to be. The rains
that used to come twice a year now only appear once.

There are other knock-on effects of dropping water levels for a
country dependent on hydro-electricity. River levels had dropped so
low in 2007 that electricity supplies to Dar were badly hit,
forcing rationing which in turn affected businesses and tax
revenues for the government.

As well as the changing weather patterns, DAWASA has other
challenges to deal with.

Population growth has gone handin- hand with large-scale
unplanned construction, posing particular difficulties for the
water authority in areas where there is no existing water
infrastructure.

"The solution to the problem would be to build a dam on the Ruvu
in order to store excess water from a good rainy season," says
Midala. But a plan to build a dam at Kidunda in a game reserve had
costs to both the wildlife and to people living there who would
have lost their land. It didn't take off.

The authority realizes that the River Ruvu is a finite resource
and doesn't want to tap underground water due to environmental
implications but its options are limited. Less rainfall and growing
demand for an increasingly scarce but vital resource means there is
little choice.

Work is about to get underway to drill 20 deep wells that can
produce 260,000 cubic metres a day while the lower Ruvu treatment
plan will shortly be expanded to increase output by nearly 90,000
cubic metres a day. The Norwegian Embassy is also funding a USD 6
million research project on the sustainability of tapping a deep
water aquifer that could help meet some of the city's water
needs.

Although Dar es Salaam is home to 10 per cent of the country's
population, other parts of Tanzania are also being hit by the
uncertain access to water with implications for further
out-migration from rural areas.

In towns like Arusha in the north which has also seen an
explosion in population growth unaccompanied by proper town
planning and resource management, farmers and agricultural workers
are already at the sharp end of climate change and environmental
degradation.

The snows of Africa's tallest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro, have
long been an iconic image of East Africa. But now, even on a clear
day, it's hard to see much snow. In the past century,

Its fertile lower slopes and surrounding lands are famous for
its banana and coffee plantations. But locals say these crops are
no longer doing so well. The weather has changed though soil
erosion and lack of irrigation systems also play their part.

A local priest and lifelong resident of Moshi, the main town in
Kilimanjaro region, says people are not able to earn as much as
they used to and livelihoods could disappear. The easy option is to
leave for the cities in search of work. Droughts, crop failures and
environmental degradation have already led to some farmers from
Tanzania's more arid areas to leave their land in search of the
city's bright lights. Only to find that water is as much an issue
there as it was back home.