This study examines the performance of the policy of community management for rural groundwater supply in Africa. Across the continent, policies that promote community management have dominated the rural water supply sector for decades. As a result, hundreds of thousands of village-level committees have been formed to manage community boreholes equipped with handpumps. With a significant proportion of these handpumps non-functional at any one time, increasing effort is targeted toward understanding the interacting social and physical determinants of this 'hidden crisis'. We conducted a survey of community management arrangements across six hundred sites in rural Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda, examining the extent to which management capacity is related to borehole functionality whilst accounting for a range of contextual variables. The capacity of water management arrangements (WMAs) was assessed according to four dimensions: finance system; affordable maintenance and repair; decision making, rules, and leadership; and external support. The survey reveals that 73.3% of WMAs have medium or high capacity. However, we found no strong relationship between the capacity of the WMA and the functionality of the borehole. Of the four management dimensions, affordable maintenance and repair was the best predictor of borehole functionality. However, the capacity of this dimension was seen to be the lowest overall, with 61.9% of sites weak or non-existent. Our results provide very limited support for the policy of community management, and we suggest that evidence alone has not accounted for its persistence over decades. After a short historical analysis, we conclude that explanation for the endurance of this model can be found in the nexus between evidence, ideology, and policy. We argue that it is this same nexus that will likely ensure the popularity of community management for some time to come, despite new ideas and evidence to the contrary.
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 < 0.5-7 µg l −1 ). The high percentage of Mn exceedances (14% ± 5.2% >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.
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