Tunisia Cuts Water Supply to Curb Use Amid Severe Drought

Water cuts without prior notice in areas of Tunis, Hammamet, Sousse, Monastir, and Sfax threaten to exacerbate social tensions in a country where people are suffering from poor public services, high inflation, and a weak economy.

Tunisia is suffering from a severe drought, prompting officials to declare that the ministry may begin cutting off water supplies at night during the summer to limit usage due to the country's paucity of reserves.

Yet, the ongoing lack of rain appears to have encouraged authorities in certain areas to begin doing so earlier. According to Yassin Mami, a legislator in the new parliament, employees from the national water company advised him that the frequent interruptions in water service in Hammamet city were due to "the country being threatened by water scarcity."

Tunisian dams lost roughly 1 billion cubic metres of capacity due to a lack of rain from September 2022 to mid-March 2023, according to Hamadi Habib, a senior official in the agriculture ministry.

The Sidi Salem Dam in the country's north, a crucial source of drinking water for numerous regions, has been reduced to barely 16% of its maximum capacity of 580 million cubic metres, according to official estimates.

According to Abdessalem Saidi, Central Director of the National Corporation of Water Exploitation and Distribution, the water withdrawal per capita in Tunisia is less than 450 cubic metres, significantly below the extreme water scarcity threshold of 1,000 cubic metres.