In front of a small mosque in central Tunisia, women queue at one of their village’s last water sources, a pipe meant for crop irrigation, but now a lifeline in the parched area. “We just need something to drink,” said Ribh Saket, 56, under the punishing summer sun as she placed a jerrycan beneath a makeshift tap hooked into the water supply. Like its neighbour Algeria and large areas of the Mediterranean region, Tunisia suffers from “alert drought conditions”, according to the European Drought Observatory.
But while drought and rising temperatures impact the region as a whole, repercussions are felt twofold in rural areas, where poverty rates tend to be higher. Tunisia’s national water grid supplies almost all of the country’s urban areas, but only about half of the rural population. The other half largely rely on wells built by local agrarian associations officially working under the agriculture ministry.
“We’ve been marginalised,” said Saket, whose village of around 250 families had one such well. But it was shut down in 2018 due to unpaid electricity bills — a common issue among agrarian associations — and the villagers were left without pumps to extract the water for their community in the Sbikha area, about 30 kilometres north of Kairouan city. Since then, the families said they have been relying on water from wells originally dug up by local farmers to irrigate their lands.
None of these wells have been authorised by the state as they are often .