Community management of groundwater - Handpumps:

Last week’s blog post discussed the possibility of groundwater to be used as a water source, in particular for irrigation. This week I will discuss a common way of extraction - the hand pump.

Many countries in the arid desert regions of Africa such as Egypt, Libya and Algeria, receive small amounts of precipitation and therefore rely heavily on groundwater resources.  The hand pump, shown in Figure 1, is a mechanism responsible for providing over 200 million Africans living in rural areas with water (Hope, 2015.) This method is commonly part of community management of groundwater. 

Figure 1: Hand pump in use (InHabitat, 2012)

Community management refers to approaches in which members of a community are able to participate directly in their own development. This bottom-up approach sees NGOs providing the community with the knowledge and occasionally funds, however the community is in control of the operation including construction, operations and maintenance (Harvey and Reed, 2007.) Hand pumps take advantage of intermediate technology available to the community, this level of technology is cheap to acquire and easy to maintain. This type of development makes the most of resources available to the community, evidence suggests that they fail less often than water supplies constructed through an aid or government scheme (Carter et al, 1999.) By taking development into their own hands, the approach is expected to be more successful than a top-down approach through a sense of ownership, pride and dignity. These approaches are a direct response to the inability of the government to provide water infrastructure.

A Fig Leaf for State Failure?

There is a question of the handpumps’ effectiveness and long-term sustainability. Community management is inefficient as maintenance is never up to standard. It is said that out of the 1 million hand pumps in Africa, 1/3 are not working at any given time (Hope, 2015.) Repairs are carried out at a slow and sub-standard rate and funding committees are often  in operative or unable to gather the necessary funds. The average savings are only 2% of the agreed expected level (Chowns, 2015.) The community is then fragmented over conflicts of funds. 

Another issue is one of replicability. The choice of hand pumps as water management is contextual. There are many factors to consider in the feasibility of these projects. Physical conditions must be ideal in order to production costs to remain low. Ideal conditions require high levels of precipitation, steep elevations transport water through gravitational pull, does water require chemical treatment. 

The popularity of the hand pump is questionable considering its effectiveness and consequently its lack of success. Further puzzling is why governments continue to to market these projects as successes. Community management in Africa has romanticised undertones of colonialism, of helping the defenceless and thus appear more attractive to NGOs and foreign direct investors (as mentioned in the introductory post.) Additionally, given that the blame of the failure falls on the community, the government is freed of blame and responsibility of ensuring longer-term water infrastructure. Community management conceal state failure and a stepping stone towards privatisation (Chowns, 2015.) Both of these points explain why these projects continue to exist in African countries.

Whilst hand pumps is an widely used method of extracting water, other methods can prove more effective for agricultural processes, especially at a larger scale, and the promotion of food security. Top-down accountability and funding is beneficial for the long term sustainability of water infrastructure in the case of the multi-dimensional relationship of water and food.