USAID paper assessing groundwater exploitation and management in West Africa.
Water resource exploitation has increased rapidly in West Africa in recent times, mostly to provide drinking water under the auspices of the Millenium Development Goals. While boreholes and hand-pumps represent relatively modest stresses on water resources, there are three ways in which the exploitation of groundwater resources in rural West Africa are currently threatened: increasing temperatures and more variable rainfall through climate change, increasing populations, and the spread and advance of motorised pumping. This paper seeks to address these potential impacts and propose ways to ensure that water resources are not permanently depleted.
The authors find that there is weak institutional capacity for effective governance of water throughout the region, with initiatives largely limited to national-level dialogue that fails to reach the local level where water is actually managed. Meanwhile, databases are centralised in national capitals, and of little use as management tools to practitioners.
There is an increasing recognition that Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) is the best approach for the sustainable exploitation of water. IWRM requires an understanding that groundwater cannot be managed independently of surface water - the two are connected hydrologically - and that all sources of water, together with a focus on both supply and demand, should be factored in together. Also necessary for IWRM is that it is a participatory process; it does not function well when left to governmental agencies. Ultimately, the water users themselves must be fully involved.
The paper concludes that the Multiple-Use Services model of water use (MUS), successfully piloted in Niger under the recent West Africa Water Initiative, is a useful base to build upon to implement IWRM. Such an approach incorporates all water resources and demands (domestic, livestock, agriculture, etc) and provides a comprehensive management plan for resource use that does not deplete resources beyond annual replenishment levels. The recommended approach to implementing this strategy is to start at the local level, and slowly build upward with more large and formal organisations to share in the governance of all water sources.