Author: RWSN Secretariat

  • Commentary on UN Sustainable Development Goals

    On September 25, 2015, the global development agenda for the next 15 years was set at the United Nations General Assembly following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). GroFutures Team members Simon Damkjaer and Richard Taylor comment on the limitations of current metrics used to assess progress toward SDG 6.4 – “to… substantially reducing…

  • GroFutures launched at Inception Workshop in Addis Ababa
    GroFutures launched at Inception Workshop in Addis Ababa

    Some 25 social and physical scientists from 12 participating organisations in 11 different countries met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to kick-off the GroFutures project. The GroFutures team began the workshop with a field trip to the Upper Awash Basin to assess changing patterns of groundwater management and use. Team members then worked together to review…

  • BRAVE project holds workshop on groundwater for the poor

    Source: ISD (G.D. Zaney) on www.ghana.gov.gh There is the need to develop resilient agricultural water supplies as an essential first step to ensuring safe and reliable access to water by the rural poor, Ben Ampomah, Executive Secretary of the Water Resources Commission (WRC) of Ghana, has noted. Mr Ampomah, therefore, identified groundwater has having a…

  • T-Group MSc. Research Students Arrive in Tanzania
    T-Group MSc. Research Students Arrive in Tanzania

    by: Maryam Nastar (on T-group.science) Three students from the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education have arrived in Dar es Salaam and will commence their master’s thesis field work in the coming week. Shabana Abbas, Carlos Aponte and Tlhoriso Morienyane will be based in Arusha for three months to study different aspects of groundwater. Their thesis work…

  • new GroFutures website

    Grofutures is one of the five UPGro Consortium Projects, led by Professor Richard Taylor at University College London (UCL).  There is now a comprehensive new website that provides all the latest news and background on the study. The Objectives of Grofutures are: Inclusive groundwater governance: GroFutures will develop an inclusive, participatory framework for groundwater governance…

  • Stop the Rot – helps us stop the scandal of pump corrosion
    Stop the Rot – helps us stop the scandal of pump corrosion

    This week RWSN/UPGro hosted a webinar on: Overcoming the Rural Water Supply Scandal of Handpump Corrosion (RWSN) – Recording (English) Dépasser le scandale de la corrosion des pompes manuelles dans l’approvisionnement rural en eau (RWSN) – Recording (French) The key points are: handpump corrosion has been known about for 30 years, it is avoidable yet…

  • Research: Is climate change making groundwater supplies in Sub-Saharan Africa less reliable?

    source: University of Reading blog Over 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) depend upon groundwater supplies, and this is set to rise dramatically. Safe and reliable access to water for the rural poor is a critical factor when reducing the proportion of people living in extreme poverty. As the majority of poor people in…

  • Overcoming the Rural Water Supply Scandal of Handpump Corrosion

    Handpump corrosion has been known about for over 30 years, the fact that it is a common problem in over 25 countries is a scandal and reflects badly on donors, implementers and governments. In this webinar, Bony Etti and Jacinta Nekesa from WaterAid Uganda describe their shocking findings from investigating boreholes and pumps (as part…

  • Sanitation and Water for All? a view from the SWA partner meeting

    Last week, I attended the Sanitation & Water for All (SWA), partnership meeting in The Hague, Netherlands. Skat Foundation is a member of the Research & Learning constituency of SWA and I was there, among other things, to represent RWSN, both to raise relevant issues from our network with SWA partners, but also to find…

  • Why it’s time to elevate groundwater – The World Bank

    On the World Bank’s Water Blog, Jacob Burke and Marcus Wijnen make the case for better groundwater governance: Groundwater stored in the earth’s crust underpins all our lives – the ultimate source of freshwater for billions has become victim of over-extraction and the ultimate sink for pollutants. For too long, not enough has been done…