Introduction: Groundwater Management, Sanitation and Health.

1. Introduction: Groundwater Management, Sanitation and Health. – An overview of the roles and interaction between groundwater and sanitation and the potential impacts on community health. Facilitator: R Owen

2. A new course exploring the nexus between groundwater and sanitation • Why a new course? • Most domestic water in rural areas is groundwater – so information about groundwater benefits and threats is pertinent. • The contrasts between surface water and groundwater with respect to sanitation needs to be better understood. • Few people understand groundwater management issues.

3. Groundwater Management for Sanitation & Health • Benefits: • Groundwater can readily be found at most localities – making it an easy and cheap source to develop for domestic water supplies. • Hygiene and sanitation are strongly correlated with adequate quantities of readily available water. • Groundwater is ‘drought resistant’ and most boreholes continue to provide water long after streams and small surface dams have dried up. • Health issues often arise when there are critical shortages of domestic water. • Groundwater may often be used as potable water without any treatment due to lack of bacteria as a result of filtering effect of the ground. • Water-borne diseases, such as cholera, are closely linked to bacterial contaminated water – eg. e coli

4. Groundwater Management for Sanitation & Health • Benefits: • Groundwater is far less at risk of contamination from a variety of sources, such as septic tanks, effluent disposal, industrial waste etc.. • Threats: • Groundwater is still at risk from factors such as over-abstraction, because the reservoir is invisible. • Once contaminated, groundwater is very difficult to clean up • Some aquifers are highly vulnerable, especially shallow aquifers • Groundwater must be pumped with many implications • There are recurrent costs required for O&M, necessitating community structures to manage water points • lack of well point maintenance is a major problem • poor well-head protection can lead to direct pollution of the water • point and diffuse pollution from a variety of sources can accumulate slowly and unnoticed

5. Your Expectations • What would you like to achieve during this course? • List critical groundwater management / santitation issues that you face in your work. • Can you identify the best approaches to address these issues? • Indicate one key change that you would like to see within one year’s time with regards to groundwater management for sanitation.