Category: A hidden crisis? Strengthening the evidence base on the sustainability of rural groundwater services

  • Ethiopia Phase 2 – Survey Update

    Phase 2 of the Hidden Crisis fieldwork is underway – right on schedule. The work has started in Ejere, a Woreda about 100 km north of Addis in Ethiopia. In this major survey of 50 poorly functioning rural waterpoints, we spend two days dismantling and testing each water point to work out what the main […]…

  • Uganda lift off!

    The physical sciences longitudinal studies have kicked off in Uganda this week. The aim of these longitudinal studies is to capture the time-based hydroclimatic and hydrogeological processes of the groundwater system at selected hand pumped boreholes (HPBs). These temporal datasets provide valuable information to understanding HPB functionality that could not be addressed from the two […]…

  • New: “Can ‘functionality’ save the community management model of rural water supply?
    New: “Can ‘functionality’ save the community management model of rural water supply?

    We are pleased to share a new UPGro paper from Luke Whaley and Prof. Frances Cleaver (Sheffield University) of the Hidden Crisis study – “Can ‘functionality’ save the community management model of rural water supply?” It is primarily a literature review paper so many elements will be familiar to rural water practitioners, however, Whaley and Cleaver…

  • @engineer4change : Charitable Foundations Have a Unique Opportunity to Change the WASH Sector

    In a recent Engineering for Change (E4C) article, “Charitable Foundations Have a Unique Opportunity to Change the WASH Sector”, UPGro Hidden Crisis research was cited  in making the case for stronger efforts by charities and funders to focus on the sustainability of what they fund: The Unlocking the Potential for Groundwater for the Poor (UPGro)…

  • Piecing together Africa’s groundwater history
    Piecing together Africa’s groundwater history

    The UPGro programme, supported by AfriWatSan & ESPRC, conducted a pan-African capacity-strengthening and knowledge co-production workshop at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania from the 10th to 12th of February, 2017. 40 participants from 12 countries in Africa took part and analysed multi-decadal, groundwater-level data (“chronicles”) from 9 countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana,…

  • Hidden Crisis team reveal themselves in Edinburgh
    Hidden Crisis team reveal themselves in Edinburgh

    reposted from: https://upgro-hidden-crisis.org/2016/12/07/2nd-project-workshop-meeting-edinburgh-21-24-nov-2016/ Overview and aims of the workshop Since our last project workshop, held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia in September 2015, the first main survey phase of the project (to survey the functionality and performance of a sub-sample of water points and committees) has been completed within each of the three countries, alongside a rapid…

  • UPGro at the RWSN Forum

    Groundwater is critical to rural water supply – for many uses and in many parts of the world, not just in Africa. Therefore understanding of aquifers and how to use them sustainably is essential to tackling rural poverty. So that is why we will be at the 7th RWSN Forum next week in Abidjan, Cote…

  • Awards for UPGro researchers

    During the first day of the 43rd IAH Congress in Montpellier, France the 2016 Awards of the International Association of Hydrogeologists were announced: “At the Annual General Meeting in the evening, the new Applied Hydrogeology Award was presented to Dr Richard Carter (pictured) in recognition of his life time research in applied hydrogeology in Africa and…

  • Prof. Richard Carter scoops IAH Award
    Prof. Richard Carter scoops IAH Award

    We are delighted that Professor Carter, a member of the UPGro Knowledge Broker team and Hidden Crisis project, received the first ever “Applied Hydrogeology Award” from the International Association of Hydrogeologists: ‘for “a groundwater professional who has made an outstanding contribution to the application of hydrogeology, preferably in developing countries or in support of international…

  • New El Niño research grant awarded to UPGro investigators

    A research team, led by Prof. Alan MacDonald of BGS, has been awarded research funding by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) for a study entitled “Monitoring the impact of the 2015/16 El Nino on rural water insecurity in Ethiopia: learning lessons for climate resilience“ El Niño is a prolonged warming of sea surface…