Not rated — no significant reservoirs
Cape Verde is set aside from the ranking rather than graded. Having no significant reservoir storage is a geographic fact, not a transparency failure — so assigning an “F” would be misleading.
H1 2026 Evaluation
Cape Verde Reservoir Transparency
N/AWhy it's not rated
No reservoirs above the qualifying scale: only micro-dams (Poilao ~1.7 hm³, Faveta, Saquinho).
Where its water comes from
Reverse-osmosis desalination and groundwater, with minor agricultural dams.
Reference source
ANAS — Agência Nacional da Água e do Saneamento (successor to INGRH since 2013)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/7/6/2641Evaluator notes
Cape Verde's RTI score reflects one of the starkest mismatches between water scarcity urgency and data transparency in this cohort. With severe freshwater scarcity across all inhabited islands, knowledge of dam storage levels in Poilão, Faveta, Saquinho (Santiago), and Saltos (Fogo) is operationally critical for the population — yet none of this data is publicly available. ANAS (the reformed successor to INGRH) monitors these dams as part of its mandate, and USGS partnership suggests calibrated monitoring capacity, but neither the methodology nor the data is exposed to the public. The country's water governance history is instructive: INGRH was founded in 1992 specifically to address water resource management in an archipelago with no perennial rivers, acute drought exposure, and growing demand. Poilão Dam (Chinese aid-funded, completed 2006) was designed as a strategic water security asset for Santiago. Academic studies of reservoir ecosystems (2018 PMC study documenting Microcystis blooms in Faveta) confirm that researchers access these reservoirs physically, but institutional data is not routed to public platforms. Publishing dam storage levels in Portuguese via a simple ANAS web dashboard would represent a low-cost, high-impact transparency improvement for a population highly dependent on these reservoirs.
Evaluated by Jaime Delgado · 2026-09-15 · Methodology v1.3.0