Hazardous water: an assessment of water quality and accessibility in the Likangala Catchment area in Malawi

Access to potable water supply remains a serious challenge to the local communities in the Likangala River catchment in southern Malawi. The quality of water resources is generally poor and the supply is inadequate. This paper discusses the results of laboratory analysis of water samples collected from selected water points in the Likangala Basin including the Likangala River itself, existing boreholes and hand dug wells, Likangala Irrigation Scheme and Lake Chilwa at Kachulu harbour. It shows that the water is grossly polluted with faecal matter which comes from the disposal of sewage effluents by different institutions in the Municipality of Zomba. On the other hand, studies conducted on household accessibility to potable water supply indicate that more than 60% of the human population living in the catchment area depends on unprotected traditional wells and the Likangala River for domestic water supply requirements. The poor quality of the water in the catchment area and the inadequacy of water supply facilities have been noted to be the major causes for the recurrent outbreaks of water associated diseases, especially cholera, that affect the local community periodically.Keywords: access; water quality; Likangala river; Malaw

The potential impacts of climate change on hydropower: An assessment of Lujeri micro hydropower scheme, Malawi

Climate change has the potential to affect hydropower generation by either increasing or reducing flows (discharge) and the head. This paper assessed the impacts of climate change on hydropower generation with a focus on Lujeri micro-hydropower scheme in Mulanje district, Malawi. The study analyzed trends in weather time series (air temperature and rainfall) data from 1980 to 2011 in connection to changes in river discharge and their associated impacts on hydropower generation profile. The Mann-Kendall (MK) test was used to detect trends in air temperature, precipitation and discharge. Correlation analysis was also used to uncover the relationship between discharge and precipitation as well as between discharge and temperature. The MK results highlighted significant rising rates of air temperature, precipitation and discharge in some months and decreasing trend in some other months, suggesting significant changes have occurred in the area. The relationship between precipitation and discharge was not significant (p = 0.552), while that between temperature and discharge was significant (p = 0.0001). Therefore, as temperature showed significant increasing trend, it will be associated with decrease in discharge, consequently a decrease in hydropower generation (power is directly proportion to discharge). Hence, proper adaptation measures such as standby alternative sources of energy and storage mechanisms devices should be exploited to ensure electric power is available throughout the year, especially in the hot and dry season when the discharge is usually very low.Key words: Climate change, discharge rate, hydropower, Malawi, precipitation, temperatur

The Tiyeni Deep-Bed Farming System: a Field Manual

This field manual has been developed as a resource for farmers and technical staff who have an interest in adopting Tiyeni’s deep-bed farming system as a means of increasing crop production in a sustainable manner. The aim is to provide the user with a background and context to the Tiyeni method, as well as detailed step-by-step guidelines for its field implementation

On the potential of Google AMP to promote local content in developing regions

The Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has gained lot of interest from content providers as a means to improve user experience. It introduces a number of innovations to streamline the downloading, parsing and rendering of pages. Google recently announced the hosting of more than 2B+ web pages, covering more than 900K domains. Due to the constrained nature of Internet connectivity in developing regions, AMP offers particularly exciting potential for improving web user experience in these countries. This paper provides a first look at Google\u2019s AMP performance in Africa. We start by outlining the current web infrastructure provisioning in Africa, using local news websites as a case study. Discovering a sparse and low performance environment, we then evaluate the benefits that AMP can introduce in terms of accessibility to local content in developing regions. This study reveals that in Africa, AMP is able to reduce page load time and page size by a factor of 3 and 8 respectively. However, AMP is not a neutral technology as the search engine favours content that is using Google AMP. This raises an important question of search neutrality

Drinking water quality from rural handpump-boreholes in Africa

Groundwater provides a vital source of drinking water for rural communities in many parts of Africa, particularly in the dry season when there are few safe alternative sources. This paper summarises results from a study (n = 428) assessing dry season water quality, both microbiological and inorganic chemistry, in handpump equipped boreholes (HPBs) across the Ethiopia Highlands (n = 142), Malawi (n = 162) and Uganda (n = 124) using a stratified, randomised sampling design. This study seeks to examine general water quality by randomly sampling rural groundwater supplies across larger areas with different geology and climate. The majority, 72%, of HPBs surveyed provide good quality dry season drinking water as defined by WHO drinking water quality criteria. Within this overall picture, the most notable constraints were from thermotolerant coliforms (TTCs), which exceeded the WHO drinking water guideline of zero colony forming units (cfu/100 ml) in 21% of sites (range 0–626 cfu/100 ml). TTC contamination was found to have a significant and positive correlation with annual average rainfall (ρ = 0.2, p = 0.00003). Across all three countries, WHO health based chemical drinking water quality values were exceeded at 9% of sites and were found for manganese (4%), fluoride (2.6%) and nitrate (2.5%); arsenic concentrations were below the guideline value of 10 μg l−1 (range 400 μg l−1) found in drinking water sources in Uganda challenges the decision by WHO not to formalise a health-based guideline for Mn. While the overall level of microbiological contamination from HPBs is low, results from this study strongly suggest that at a national and regional level, microbiological contamination rather than chemical contamination will provide a greater barrier to achieving targets set for improved drinking water quality under the UN-SDG 6. Efforts should be made to ensure that boreholes are properly sited and constructed effectively to reduce pathogen contamination

UPGro Hidden Crisis Research Consortium. Survey 1 Country Report, Malawi

Statistics on the functionality of water points from the Hidden Crisis project in Malawi are presented. The survey, undertaken in 2016, was focussed on boreholes equipped with handpumps (HPBs) within sedimentary and basement rock in Malawi across 5 districts. A stratified two-stage sampling strategy was adopted, and a tiered definition of functionality developed which enabled more nuanced definitions to be reported. The results from the survey indicate: • 74% of HPBs were working on the day of the survey (similar to national statistics) • 67% of HPBs passed the design yield of 10 litres per minute • 58% passed the design yield and also experienced < 1 month downtime within a year. • 41% of HPB’s passed the design yield and reliability and also passed WHO standards of water quality indicators (TTCs and inorganic chemistry). These figures provide a more detailed examination/understanding of the national functionality figures (MoWDI 2012 ). Both approaches show, that at any one point in time approximately 74% of HPBs in Malawi are working. The results from the more detailed Hidden Crisis survey across a sub-sample of HPBs across Malawi, indicate that 42% of the working HPB’s do not provide sufficient yield or reliability. This highlights the utility of carrying out more detailed assessments of functionality to help unpack national statistics. A linked survey of the performance of the water management arrangements at water points showed that for 86% of the survey sites water management arrangements were judged to be functional or highly functional

An analysis of hand pump boreholes functionality in Malawi

A survey on the functionality of boreholes equipped with hand pumps was undertaken in five districts in Malawi in 2016. The survey aimed at developing a robust evidence-base of the performance of hand pump boreholes by applying a tiered assessment of functionality: (1) working at the time of survey (2) producing the design yield of the borehole; (3) working for >11 months per year and (4) delivering water quality requirements from the World Health Organisation (WHO). This information would guide sustainable future investments in water and sanitation projects. A stratified two-stage random sampling strategy was adopted. The results from the survey indicate that 74% of hand pump boreholes (HPBs) were working at the time of survey; 66% of HPBs passed the design yield of 10 L per minute; 55% met the design yield and also experienced less than one month downtime within a year. Only 43% of HPBs met all the functionality requirements including WHOguidelines for drinking water quality. The survey also assessed the village-level Water Management Arrangements at each water point. Results indicate that the majority of the Water Management Arrangements (86%) are functional or highly functional. The initial exploration of the data shows no simple relationship between the physical functionality and Water Management Arrangements

A Model for Language Annotations on the Web

Several annotation models have been proposed to enable a multilingual Semantic Web. Such models hone in on the word and its morphology and assume the language tag and URI comes from external resources. These resources, such as ISO 639 and Glottolog, have limited coverage of the world's languages and have a very limited thesaurus-like structure at best, which hampers language annotation, hence constraining research in Digital Humanities and other fields. To resolve this `outsourced' task of the current models, we developed a model for representing information about languages, the \textbf{Mo}del for \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{A}nnotation (\langmod{}), such that basic language information can be recorded consistently and therewith queried and analyzed as well. This includes the various types of languages, families, and the relations among them. \langmod{} is formalized in OWL so that it can integrate with Linguistic Linked Data resources. Sufficient coverage of \langmod{} is demonstrated with the use case of French