Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Namibia’s President-elect Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah on Jan. 6, in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, highlighting the necessity for Africa and the Global South generally to increase the building of seawater-desalination plants in order to overcome water scarcity. Wang confirmed that China’s leading nuclear group, China General Nuclear Power Group, will begin building this year a desalination plant that will be completed by 2026, with a capacity of 25 million cubic meters of water per year. It is a joint effort with Namibia’s state-owned Namibia Water Corporation.The new desalination plant will be the largest in the southern part of the continent.
The plant will be located near the settlement of Wlotzkasbaken, which is located essentially in the Namib Desert along the Namibian coast, joining Namibia’s one other existing desalination plant in the same location. Namibia is the most arid country in Sub-Saharan Africa and is currently experiencing one of its worst droughts in a century. Lack of water is a major cause of the country’s low population: only 3 million people.
Morocco signed an agreement in October 2024 with the French company Veolia for the construction of a seawater-desalination plant near Rabat on the Atlantic coast, with a capacity of 300 million cubic meters per year, enough to ensure the supply of the Rabat-Salé-Kénitra and Fès-Meknès regions to meet the water needs of nearly 9.3 million inhabitants. It will be the largest desalination plant in Africa, and second-largest in the world.
Lack of water limits development in many nations. Consider the distribution of water on Earth. The oceans contain 97.2% of all Earth’s water, while glaciers and other ice constitute another 2.15%. Groundwater constitutes only 0.61%—less than a percent of the world’s water—with freshwater lakes making up only 0.009% of the world’s water. There is not enough groundwater to sustain the world’s population, in some places, even for a short period. One-third of the world’s land surface is classified as desert.
Some 2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization; 3 billion lack handwashing facilities; and 4.2 billion lack access to safely managed sanitation services, with devastating health implications. Humanity needs to intervene urgently to assist in generating massive amounts of clean water. It can be done through interbasin water transfer (as in the Transaqua project to replenish Lake Chad and the North American Water and Power Alliance, or NAWAPA), through using earth-based ionization to bring rivers of moisture from the atmosphere, and through desalination.
There are between 16,000 and 21,000 seawater-desalination plants in the world, some quite small. Saudi Arabia currently has the world’s largest desalination plant, at Raz Al Khair. It generates 1,080 million cubic meters of clean water per year. Desalinated water provides some 42% of drinking water in the U.A.E., 70% in Saudi Arabia, 86% in Oman, and 90% in Kuwait.
Desalination is a prominent feature of the Oasis Plan proposed by Lyndon LaRouche.
For more on the technologies behind desalination, see “Tech Advances in Seawater Desalination Bring Us Closer to Plentiful, Cheap Supply of De-Salted Water.”