A hidden crisis: unravelling current failures for future success in rural groundwater supply

扩大和维持获得安全可靠的供水服务仍然是改善非洲穷人，特别是妇女的健康和生计的关键。据估计，这里仍有3.5亿农村居民没有安全饮用水，他们的所有家庭需求都依赖于质量低劣、不可靠的水源。改善获得水的机会，并帮助实现普遍获得安全水的新的国际目标，取决于加快地下水资源的开发，通常是通过钻孔和为其配备手摇泵。然而，对新基础设施的重视掩盖了一个隐藏的失败危机，30%的新能源在5年内无法运行，还有更多的不可靠。这一问题在过去40年中仍然顽固存在，尽管采取了各种干预措施，但几乎没有取得持续进展的迹象。这一持续失败的部分原因是对失败的复杂、多方面的原因缺乏系统的调查，因此同样的错误经常重复。政府、捐助者，尤其是所有农村人民的累积成本是巨大的。解决功能危机需要一步一步地改变对继续出错的理解。必须从真正跨学科的角度处理这个复杂的问题：结合创新的自然科学来评估当地水资源的可获得性，以及水资源如何随季节和气候变化；结合对当地社区如何运作并就管理其基础设施作出决策的详细社会科学研究；以及了解工程结构如何退化。这些水源故障的根本原因可能是其他促成因素，如政府激励、捐助者的作用或水需求的长期变化。该项目的总体目标是根据地下水系统和服务故障的不可接受的高比率的原因建立一个强有力的多国证据基础，并利用这一知识实现未来功能的阶段性变化。为了实现这一目标，我们的研究采用了一种新颖的跨学科方法，使用了自然科学和社会科学的最新思维和技术，并将其应用于乌干达、埃塞俄比亚和马拉维这三个几十年来一直在服务可持续性方面苦苦挣扎的非洲国家。它有五个主要目标：1.严格定义供水点的功能，考虑季节性、质量和服务预期；2.将这一新定义应用于埃塞俄比亚、乌干达和马拉维，以获得更真实的供水点功能图景，从而获得水覆盖数字；3.通过拆解供水点和水泵，测试当地地下水状况，检查地下水的可再生性，并详细探索当地供水委员会，详细调查每个国家的50个供水点；4.我们还将基于这些信息，通过模拟各种潜在的未来路径对供水点的影响来预测未来农村供水覆盖范围；5.最后，我们将利用所有这些信息，制定一种方法，在未来的农村供水方案中建立复原力，并帮助人们决定何时值得修复故障水源。为了开展这项开创性的研究，我们召集了一个由英国地质调查局领导的联盟，该联盟由英国地质调查局、KCL、ODI和剑桥的领先跨学科研究人员组成，其中包括来自三所备受尊敬的非洲大学(亚的斯亚贝巴大学、梅克雷雷大学和马拉维大学)的地下水学者，以及具有创新历史的领先非政府组织水援助组织。这项研究有可能对整个非洲可靠的清洁水的提供产生重大影响，如果研究结果能够被广泛采用，就可以打破反复失败的模式。

Extending and sustaining access to safe and reliable water services remains central to improving the health and livelihoods of poor people, particularly women, in Africa. Here an estimated 350 million rural inhabitants still have no form of safe drinking water, and depend on poor quality unreliable sources for all their domestic needs. Improving access to water, and helping to achieve new international goals of universal access to safe water hinges on accelerated development of groundwater resources, usually through drilling boreholes and equipping them with handpumps. However, emphasis on new infrastructure has obscured a hidden crisis of failure, with >30% of new sources non-functional within 5-years and many more unreliable. This problem has remained stubbornly persistent over the last four decades, with little sign of sustained progress despite various interventions. Part of the reason for this continued failure is the lack of systematic investigations into the complex multifaceted reasons for failure and therefore the same mistakes are often repeated. The accumulated costs to governments, donors and above all rural people are enormous. Addressing the functionality crisis requires a step-change in understanding of what continues to go wrong. The complex issue must be approached from a truly interdisciplinary viewpoint: combining innovative natural sciences to assess the availability of local water resources and how this changes with seasons and climate; with detailed social science research of how local communities function and make decisions about managing their infrastructure; and understanding of how the engineered structures can degenerate. Underlying these reasons for source failure may be other contributory factors, such as government incentives, the role of the donor community, or long term changes in the demand for water.The overall aim of the project is to build a robust, multi-country evidence base on the causes of the unacceptably high rates of groundwater system and service failure and use this knowledge to deliver a step-change in future functionality. To achieve this aim, our research draws on a novel interdisciplinary approach using the latest thinking and techniques in both natural and social science and applies them to three African countries that have struggled for decades with service sustainability - Uganda, Ethiopia and Malawi. There are five main objectives:1.to provide a rigorous definition of functionality of water points which accounts for seasonality, quality and expectations of service; 2. to apply this new definition to Ethiopia, Uganda and Malawi to get a more realistic picture of water point functionality and therefore water coverage figures; 3. to investigate in detail 50 water points in each country by taking apart the water points and pumps, testing the local groundwater conditions, examining the renewability of groundwater and exploring in detail the local water committee; 4. we will also build on this information to forecast future rural water supply coverage by modelling the impact on water points of various potential future pathways; and 5. finally we will use all this information to develop an approach for building resilience into future rural water supply programmes and helping people decide when it is worth rehabilitating failed sources. To carry out this ground breaking research we have brought together a consortium, led by the British Geological Survey, of leading interdisciplinary UK researchers at BGS, KCL, ODI and Cambridge with groundwater academics from three highly regarded African universities (Universities of Addis Ababa, Mekerere and Malawi), and WaterAid, a leading NGO on developing rural water supply services across Africa with a history of innovation.The research has the potential to have a major impact on the delivery of reliable clean water throughout Africa, and if the results can be taken up widely break the pattern of repeated failure.