As the world’s fastest growing continent, Africa is full of potential. It is abundant in natural resources and has an incredible array of biodiversity. It is also home to the world’s youngest population, which is diverse and vibrant.

At the same time, Africa faces increasing threats from challenges such as water security, energy security, social inclusion, and climate change. There are more instances of weather extremes, temperature rise, changes in precipitation levels, risks posed by sea level rise and coastal erosion, and extreme events such as flooding, droughts, and landslides. The risks posed by climate change can have significant impact on local communities, the economy, infrastructure, and the environment. It also affects human health, food and water-security, and socio-economic development. Rapid urban expansion, growing populations, and land degradation also add to the pressure on the available resources in deltas, coastal zones, and river basins.

These challenges are also opportunities, stimulating the green economic transition and allowing Africa to harness its full potential.

Local expertise

Deltares devises solutions for water, sub-soil, and infrastructure-related problems arising from these challenges. With a proven track record in over 30 African countries, we work closely with local stakeholders, including the African corporate sector, national, local and regional governments, NGOs, academia, and multilateral organisations.

Our solutions are tailored locally to meet the varying issues across the continent, such as flash floods and water management in Northern Africa, coastal erosion in Western Africa, drought and floods in Central Africa, aridification in Eastern Africa, and coastal flooding in Southern Africa. We offer innovative, practical, cost-effective, integrative, and nature-based solutions.

Our projects span a wide range of topics such as coastal erosion, adaptation, and protection, harbour infrastructure design, environmental- and water quality, integrated water resources management, delta infrastructure and sustainable delta citifies, flood and drought early warning, flood risk management, urban resilience, and operational management of reservoirs.

Tools and resources

We integrate our technical knowledge with governance and policy-making to solve problems in these highly complex and dynamic delta systems.

Deltares develops knowledge, tools, and resources to support the execution of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa. Together with our African stakeholders, we work on projects that consolidate and exchange knowledge. Our tools are used to diagnose, retrodict, predict processes and support activities. We provide capacity building and we collaborate with our partners for knowledge exchange in programs and research projects. All our research, software and models are made available to our clients and partners.

Working closely with our African and international partners, Deltares applies multi-disciplinary expertise to create affordable and sustainable solutions to these challenges. Using our in-house expertise, we provide integrative solutions, capitalising on our extensive experience in flood and drought risk, adaptive delta planning, infrastructure, water and subsurface resources and environment.

Dare to share

Deltares believes in openness, transparency and in sharing our knowledge. This is in line with our mission of ‘Enabling delta life’. Our dare to share principle applies to all our clients and includes the software and tools we develop, as well as our specialised and tailor-made solutions. As an applied research institute, we aim for projects that consolidate and exchange knowledge.

Climate adaptation is at the core of our work. Working together with our stakeholders, our solutions can be implemented in communities across the African continent.

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