Research Locations
Desalination has moved well beyond a niche engineering solution to become a central part of how many societies manage water — influencing cities, regions, and even whole countries. Global capacity has grown dramatically over the past few decades, making it a game-changing technology in water resource management. This rise isn’t just a technical trend — it reshapes political, economic and social relations around water. Our approach helps reveal how it can reinforce inequalities, alter governance priorities, and embed new dependencies in infrastructure and capital. These are not technical side effects but core aspects of what desalination does in society.
While the overall trend is clear – the use of desalination and other unconventional water technologies are burgeoning globally, including in the Global South – the drivers of this are highly context specific. The complex ways in which technology becomes embedded in local contexts, therefore, is the basis of our research.
Kenya
Kenya is one of Africa’s largest and most diversified economies. It functions as a regional hub for East Africa, with Nairobi hosting major financial institutions, multinational headquarters, development agencies, and a rapidly expanding services and technology sector. Kenya has become a model and testing ground for development policies, market-led reforms, and new infrastructural and technological ‘solutions’. At the same time, Kenya’s development is marked by pronounced inequality and uneven access to basic services, with large segments of the population lacking reliable access to water and sanitation services.
Large-scale desalination has been touted in coastal Kenya for some time, although no proposed project has yet come to fruition. The desalination industry has been particularly interested in Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city, because it has a large population accustomed to paying high rates for water, combined with a chronic water crisis in which the municipality has been unable to supply more than 20% of demand for many years. Mombasa was shortlisted to host the 2020 International Desalination Association conference. However, two desalination plants proposed for the city around the same time were abandoned for financial reasons. Elsewhere on the coast, a large public-private partnership (PPP) project is proposed for the port at Lamu, which is currently going through the permitting process with Kenya’s PPP Directorate.
While efforts to develop large-scale desalination have stalled, off-grid smaller scale facilities have burgeoned. Organisations like GivePower and Water Kiosk Africa are installing small-scale, solar-powered desalination systems in under-serviced areas. Both of these organisations, however, rely on donors and aid to keep the costs of water low enough for the communities, and even so, the water produced is generally too expensive for any use other than drinking, and even that is too costly for people in the poorest areas. In addition, many under-serviced areas are unsuitable for this model, and it remains unclear what the scope of this kind of technology really is.
Kenya is characterized by a contradictory combination of ambitious state-led growth strategies, acute water stress, deep inequality, a financialized model of development that prioritises commercial viability over basic service provision, and aging and incomplete water infrastructure. The turn to unconventional water here exposes the contradictions of using high-technology water solutions to address structural development challenges, making Kenya a critical case for understanding the social, political, and developmental implications of ‘new water’ in the Global South.
Morocco
Morocco is seen by many as a rising power within Africa and the Arab world. Its economy has been growing constantly since the early 2000s, mostly driven by the agricultural and tourism sectors, as well as in the global market of phosphate and fertilizers. Despite this growth, the country is increasingly vulnerable to the hazards of climate change. The last drought, that lasted from 2018 to 2025, was one of the longest in Morocco’s recent history. During the winter 2025-2026, in contrast, rainfall exceeded the yearly average by several times in most of the country, particularly in the Northern regions, with floods causing the evacuation of entire cities and the destruction of crops.
The country’s plans for desalination date back several years and is has not simply emerged in the context of the recent drought. Desalination is a major pilar of the country’s water and economic strategy for the years to come. The goal is very ambitious: Morocco’s desalination market is expected to grow more than twofold in between 2024 and 2033, to reach an annual capacity of 1.7 billion cubic meters of desalinated water by 2030. According to the Minister of Equipment and Water, the country will be able to source 60% of its water needs through desalination.
The strategy mostly revolves around the construction of large-scale infrastructures built through public-private partnerships (PPPs). These mega projects do not simply aim to cover municipal needs: desalinated water is also intended to fulfil agricultural needs, a sector of strategic importance for the country’s economy and particularly export strategy. Only one of these plants are already operational. The Agadir desalination plant, operational since June 2022, is currently the largest plant in the country (275,000 m3 per day). It supplies the entire Agadir municipality, as well as several agricultural areas in the Sous-Massa region.
The spread of desalination in the country is not limited to these large-scale infrastructures, however. Small and medium scale plants, including mobile ones, are an integral part of the government’s strategy.
Morocco’s bet on desalination raises a number of questions, particularly about its commitment to decarbonise its economy. Given the considerable increase of energy required to operate desalination plants, will the country actually be able to source half of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2030? In a country in which economic growth has not delivered improved living conditions for a major portion of the population, desalination also raises concerns about exacerbated social inequalities and water justice. Finally, will desalination prove to be a viable solution in a context of heightened climate extremes?
South Africa
South Africa is Africa’ s largest economy by nominal GDP and seen by many industries as the entrée into the broader region of Sub-Saharan Africa. With membership in BRICS+, the African Union (hosting the seat of the Pan-African Parliament), SADC, SACU, the Commonwealth of Nations, and the G20, its global influence has grown since the fall of apartheid in 1994. Nonetheless, legacies from apartheid still haunt the country both in how it approaches economic development and in persistent uneven, inequitable, and disrupted water access. South Africa is also a water scarce country, a fact consistently emphasized by its national Water Research Commission and water utilities.
The promise of ‘new water’ resources have been an important theme since the early 2000s. With two of South Africa’s largest cities, Durban and Cape Town, on the coasts, and issues of water scarcity noted internationally because of events like Cape Town’s near-‘Day Zero’ of 2018, there is a lot of advocacy for desalination. South Africa’s few existing desalination plants exist for industry or were built under the duress of drought, such as in Richard’s Bay. Other South African desalination applications exist on an even smaller scale for commercial use, such as hotels and resorts. Desalination in South Africa is thus set up to be lauded as a ‘climate independent’ water supply, even though the historic reasons for uneven water access in South Africa are much more to do with dispossession under apartheid than available amounts of conventional water supplies.
Water reuse also promises to alleviate the burdens of increased water scarcity under climate change for several South African water utilities. Similarly to desalination, direct potable reuse projects in the country are few and far between, in use primarily for industrial use or at small pilot scales for municipal use. The earliest of these was commissioned in 2001 at the Durban Water Recycling Plant; a few others were commissioned in 2010; and few others have progressed past a piloting stage since. South Africa is currently considering further water quality guidelines for direct potable reuse.
South Africa represents a case of high enthusiasm for unconventional water sources, dampened by steep implementation barriers with long colonial and oppressive histories. Several governmental agencies, from the Water Research Commission to municipalities, have been trying for decades to foment this industry. Combined with new legislation to encourage public-private partnerships, the South African case demonstrates the difficulties of cultivating ‘new’ water sources even amongst high interest—and begs the question of whether scaling up this industry can be done equitably or without undue intervention from the private sector.
