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How can research help to build capacity for water resource management in the Congo Basin?

Limited publications on the Congo basin exist to date (Alsdorf, et al., 2016) especially when compared with large basins like the Zambezi, the Limpopo, the Okavango, and the Orange‐Senqu in the region of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC, Hughes et al., 2015). The accessibility is further hampered by a language barrier as most of the peer‐reviewed journals are produced in English. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Angola that represent 72% of the basin area are Francophone and Lusophone and publications in these respective languages are not always readily available to other researchers across the globe. The Congo Basin has limited primary data and few observed hydrological phenomena have been investigated in situ. Most of the basin is ungauged.

The Congo Basin, although holding the potential to unlock the water crisis for Africa, has had scant knowledge management and outreach initiatives of water research that could draw attention of the international community. No dedicated conferences on the Congo Basin have been organized systematically except for marginal initiatives like the recent AGU Chapman Conference that was dedicated to the basin. The Congo Basin over the past five decades has been characterized by unstable socioeconomic environments in most of the riparian countries. The DRC and Angola, representing 72% of the basin surface area, experienced civil unrest that could not allow long‐term research projects. Limited local human and institutional capacity for water resource management and development explains to some extent the reduced scientific productions.

The past two decades have seen a new type of local researcher as a result regional capacity building initiatives like WaterNet (Jonker et al., 2012; Kileshye Onema et al., 2020). On the one hand, this has resulted in a steady increase in the number of graduates from the riparian countries producing more outputs from primary measurements (Trigg & Tshimanga, 2020). On the other hand, the basin still suffers from the lack of hydro‐meteorological data to validate the bulk of scientific publications on the Congo where proxy measurements from remote sensing have been used to characterize hydrological processes. Recent initiatives like the SO‐Hybam Environmental Observatory (see www.so‐hybam.org), the SADC Hydrological Cycle Observation Systems (SADC‐HYCOS), or the Congo River users Hydraulic and Morphology (CRuHM) projects are trying to install data collection platforms, data loggers, and other automated instruments for flow measurement. These constitute good starting points toward addressing the challenge of observed data within the basin provided they are sustained overtime. The partnerships with institutions from the North in the production of this monograph goes in the same direction. With new institutions being established like the Congo Basin Water Resources Research Center (CRREBaC), it is imperative for the community of scientists to join some of the global discourses like the one from the International Association of Hydrological sciences on the twenty‐three unsolved problems in hydrology (Blöschl et al., 2019). The Congo Basin scientific productions could contribute toward questions related to water phenomena, processes, and estimations, as well as methods. This will be possible and sustained only through strengthening of local human and institutional capacity especially in the face of climate change (Wehn et al., 2021), rapid population growth, and water centric socioeconomic development.