"Sustainable water and environmental sanitation for all."

Welcome back to the blog! This week, remaining in Ghana, together we'll explore small-scale, bottom-up water management schemes as opposed to the large, national scale scheme we looked at last time, where communities lack input in how water is managed.  

  

Figure 1: A hand dug well, with a bucket and
rope to abstract water.

Rural communities get most of their water from shallow groundwater for irrigation and livestock (Owusu et al., 2016). Studies have been lacking in how to sustainable use groundwater, despite accounting for over 100 times more than Africa's renewable freshwater (Gaye and Tindimugaya, 2018). Local communities manage water in a few ways, all of which are low in technology which allows them to be self-sustaining (Figure 1). Examples are hang-dug wells in dry riverbeds, , or hand pumps which provide water for 200 million rural Africans (Hope, 2015). 

 

As Ghana is one of western Africa's key agricultural producers, it employs 60% of people. With climate change altering rainfall patterns, the growing and harvesting seasons are changing, one example is maize yields are suffering due to an early rainy season, but sorghum yields benefitting from this. But maize is an important crop in Ghana, making up 50% of its cereal production, so they may suffer an economic loss if they cannot grow it. Water management must be efficient to prevent this and to ensure there is no water scarcity leading to food insecurity  (Ragasa et al., 2014). 

  

There have been shifting paradigms seen in water management in recent years (Agyenim and Gupta, 2013). They are: 

• Government to governance: no longer sole decision of the government, instead businesses, scientists and citizens have a voice.
• Centralised to decentralised: bottom-up strategies leading to local communities having an input into what might be useful to them. 
• Sectoral to integrated: sustainable use of water through cooperation between sectors about how to share or distribute water (largely used in dam planning and negotiation, especially in transboundary dams) 

All these point to local, community input being a key factor in managing water in a way that will work and be sustainable for people, as well as the environment. This is the important factor to remember, just because one strategy works in one place, it is not universal. Each community understands its own needs best. Bottom-up, community strategies have been imbedded into many sub-Saharan water management policy and plans due to their successes (Shields et al., 2021).

  

Further shifts can be seen within the power imbalance in gender. Women- primary carers of the collection, management, social uses of water- have been excluded from the discussions of how to manage water despite their skills and first-hand experience. The Water Resource Management state they must have a woman to fill one of the 15 members spaces (Owusu et al., 2016). Maybe not very inclusive but it is a start! Their aims are to ensure there is "sustainable water and environmental sanitation for all" within Ghana. An aim needed to ensure they do not fall into further water scarcity!