"Africa’s businesses should help shape policies to protect our lakes"

Here is a question: what do the following have in common? A Kigoma fish wholesaler. The manager of a lakeside resort in Entebbe. A gold mine in eastern Congo. Malawi’s state electricity company. A Kenyan flower farmer, or the Kisumu city authorities. All are outfits heavily reliant for profit and growth on clean and reliable water from [Lake Victoria]...As many as 50 million Africans earn their living from these seven lakes. An even higher number are customers of those businesses.  So, it will be of urgent concern to those companies’ management that increasingly the water their operations need are neither clean nor reliable. Because of that, whether through increased taxes or levies, higher production costs, or even the poor health of employees, deteriorating water supplies are starting progressively to shrink profits...

Unregulated timber felling in Congo; mining gold with cyanide and mercury in Kenya; untreated waste piped into lakes in Uganda; the relentless climb of Rwanda’s farms up its famous thousand hills. All of these are by-products of income-generating activities that put strains on water resources, and those strains will eventually cycle back and be felt in those businesses’ bottom lines. But, so far, the private sector—so crucial to solutions to arrest this decline and instead usher in ways to sustain lake resources—has been minimally involved in discussions about the future of Africa’s Great Lakes.

...Their voices must be heard, and adding their understanding to the best in global and regional science, and government attention and support, could finally give Africa’s Great Lakes the lifelines they need...[T]hose lakes are in a near-terminal state because of the environmental impacts on them. Yes, that is terrible ecologically. But it is very bad for business, too.