Reducing risks to rural water security in Africa.

Abstract

With increasing hydro-climatic risks in Africa all water resources will be affected (Vorosmarty et al. 2010; IPCC 2012). But the response to climate variability of groundwater will be slower than that of surface water. Groundwater resources are more resilient due to aquifer storage which acts as a buffer during periods of little or no rainfall. Despite the significant availability of groundwater resources across the major geological formations in Africa, the quantitative and qualitative distribution remains partly understood (MacDonald et al. 2012). Adapting to environmental change will likely require increasing use of groundwater for both domestic and productive uses. Information costs in recording longitudinal data on aquifer recharge and use are prohibitively high and point estimates from a limited sample of verifiable drilling sites provides partial information on whether shifting patterns of groundwater availability are attributable to environmental or operational factors. Sustainable use of aquifers is critical to inform and enforce appropriate policy responses to achieve rural water security for human development and environmental resilience in Africa (Bannerjee and Morella 2011; IPCC 2012). Smart handpumps that harness Africa’s expanding mobile network architecture provide a new technology to address the systemic informational deficit that limits accountability and increases risks of investments in and management of rural water supply (Thomson et al. 2012). Automatically measuring and transmitting low cost, reliable and scalable data on handpump performance allows three inter-connecting risks to rural water security to be simultaneously addressed: (a) environmental, (b) operational, and (c) governance. By explicitly linking groundwater resource risks with operational and governance risks the overlapping objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals and Millennium Development Goals (MDG) can be linked to the United Nations’ General Assembly recognition of the Human Right to Drinking Water and Sanitation.