Individual water sourcing: understanding risks and resilience to groundwater resource abstraction in Nigeria

Across much of Africa, domestic water supplies are increasingly dependent on groundwater reserves. As the cost of accessing these reserves fall, expertise becomes more widely available and incomes rise there is a rising trend towards the private commissioning of boreholes and wells. This nascent shift towards a distributed and increasingly individualised water supply may have many implications for the resilience of communities to future environmental shocks, which are, as yet, under-explored. Drawing on the case of Nigeria and new interdisciplinary research, this paper addresses this gap, through a specific focus on understanding the behaviour and choices of individuals and other key stakeholders which underpin this trend. It also seeks to understand the possible implications of this for the resilience of associated social and ecological systems

A hidden crisis: strengthening the evidence base on the current failures of rural groundwater supplies

New ambitious international goals for universal access to safe drinking water depend critically on the ability of development partners to accelerate and sustain access to groundwater. However, available evidence (albeit fragmented and methodologically unclear) indicates >30% of new groundwater-based supplies are non-functional within a few years of construction. Critically, in the absence of a significant systematic evidence base or analysis on supply failures, there is little opportunity to learn from past mistakes, to ensure more sustainable services can be developed in the future. This work presents a new and robust methodology for investigating the causes of non-functionality, developed by an interdisciplinary team as part of an UPGro catalyst grant. The approach was successfully piloted within a test study in NE Uganda, and forms a basis for future research to develop a statistically significant systematic evidence base to unravel the underlying causes of failure