The Cape Verdean Minister of Finance, Olavo Correia, recently announced funding for a new desalination plant on Boa Vista. A zero interest €10m finance agreement for this plant was signed with the Bank of Austria. The new plant will be able to provide 5,000m3 of desalinated water each day. It is hoped that this will be sufficient water for the island. The island of Boa Vista receives the second highest number of tourists of the 9 nine inhabited islands. Therefore, this investment will help to support tourism on the island. In 2021 Austria also provided €5.5m funding for enlarging the desalination plant in Palmarejo in Praia (on Santiago). In this case it was to increase the capacity by 5,000m3 in what was already the largest desalination plant in the country. This represented an increase of around 33%, raising the output to 20,000m3 per day.
In recent years Cape Verde has suffered from prolonged periods of draught and so the government has needed to address this problem. Using sea water is an obvious solution for an island nation. Desalination has been employed within Cape Verde for over 50 years. However, in January 2020 it was necessary for the government to declare a water crisis. At that time they introduced limits on water usage. The approved plan to mitigate this situation was to increase the desalination capacity.
[09 Dec 2022]
