Abstract
Water stress is increasingly affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world. In East Africa, severe and persistent drought periods negatively impact health and livelihoods. Drought increases reliance on mechanized boreholes to extract groundwater. However, without adequate resource allocations, effective monitoring of borehole functionality, and reliable maintenance service, breakdown rates increase and downtimes last many months. Our study applies system dynamics modeling to investigate the effects of allocating resources to borehole maintenance and repair in the Afar Region in Ethiopia and Turkana County in Kenya. We inform model calibration with runtime and functionality estimates derived from sensors installed on 245 boreholes and apply sensitivity analyses varying budget allocations to optimize for functionality. We conclude that increasing the borehole repair and maintenance budgets in Turkana from the current 30% to 85% of available budgets could result in an additional 83 working boreholes and 95% functionality in 2030. In Afar, increasing maintenance budgets from 38% to 79% could result in functionality levels of 75% by 2030, well above currently projected levels of 54%.
Highlights
Climate change is expected to exacerbate drought in East Africa, with the wet season experiencing rainfall reductions in recent years (Funk et al 2015; Nicholson 2014)
Throughout model development, water technicians and monitoring specialists working with implementing organizations within the USAID-funded Ethiopia Lowland WASH (Afar) and Kenya RAPID (Turkana) programs were consulted using surveys and email communication to groundtruth estimates and assumptions around model components
Borehole time series runtime data were supplied through the USAID Lowland WASH Activity and Kenya RAPID, and through technology provided by SweetSense
Summary
Climate change is expected to exacerbate drought in East Africa, with the wet season experiencing rainfall reductions in recent years (Funk et al 2015; Nicholson 2014). Studies investigating sustainability factors for rural water services delivery have identified various interacting parameters, ranging from government structures and funding mechanisms (Pories et al 2019) to local spare parts supplies and technician availability (Harvey and Reed 2006; Klug et al 2018; Whaley and Cleaver 2017), leading to the emergence of professionalized maintenance services (Lockwood 2019; Lockwood and Le Gouais 2015) in some contexts. These services are still nascent and not widely available
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