In Rural Kenya, Can Technology Help Communities Achieve Water Security?
Microsensors present a unique opportunity to lessen the burden on communities by providing increased monitoring of water sites and functionality data to combat the many insecurities that arise without access to clean and safe water.
All living organisms require water for the functioning of their ecosystems. It isn’t hyperbolic to say that water is life. Communities experiencing water insecurity know firsthand how detrimental a lack of water access is to their quality of life. Water and sanitation-related deaths total in the millions globally, disproportionately impacting rural areas. Beyond public health, water insecurity also cripples households financially as many farmers and pastoralists rely on water to sustain their livelihoods in agriculture or tending to livestock. Time spent fetching water presents a burden on women’s time and also has adverse effects on youth, with young girls often missing out on their education to collect water that their families will use for bathing, drinking, cooking, and washing clothes. For Samburu County in northern Kenya, where the average annual rainfall is just 285 mm, prolonged drought cycles, climate change, and increasing population size are compounding to create water scarcity. 60% of the Samburu County population lacks access to improved water sources. To better adapt to this reality, affected populations need to understand not only their current water needs but their future needs too.
Rural water service delivery often defaults to community-based management (CBM), a water management approach in which community members assess the quantity and quality of the water supply in order to ensure the consumption needs of the entire community are met. CBM can be quite taxing on communities as they have few resources to sustain the necessary maintenance and repairs to water-supplying infrastructure. Surface water, which is found in lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, and dams, are a key source in addition to river wells, dug wells, and boreholes. However, periodic system failures, dysfunctional infrastructure, and underdeveloped monitoring systems leave households without a reliable source of water. Impact evaluation work from USAID reveals a series of chronic shortcomings that compromise the utility of CBM:
- limited routine maintenance
- failure to collect water tariffs
- lack of monitoring of water quality
- disrepair of systems due to scarcity of parts, funding, and technical ability for repairs
- a “fix-on-failure” and “build-fail-rehabilitate” approach that leaves communities without safe drinking water for prolonged periods
With increasing population sizes, land degradation, and reduced supplies of groundwater due to climate change, a sustainable water security intervention is urgently needed.
Mercy Corps, as part of USAID’s Nawiri program, tested microsensor technology at 15 borehole sites in Samburu County. A borehole is a drilled shaft that extracts the naturally-occurring water underground through a pump. The microsensor technology, designed by Virridy, enables county water staff and authorized water point service providers to monitor the operations and provide real-time data on their functionality. The data collected is used to reduce the water point downtime so that boreholes spend less time being non-functional and can serve as a reliable water source for the community. Virridy satellites are connected to borehole pumps where through remote sensing and machine learning, analytical insights support drought resilience by building capacity for routine monitoring of the boreholes. The overall goal of the Nawiri program is to sustainably reduce persistent acute malnutrition (PAM) through a multi-sectoral approach. With improved water governance and management, a more stable and resilient nutrition-enabling environment can exist. Over the course of the next three years, the program will continue to emphasize professionalization of water maintenance and repair.
During the pilot, participants were trained in operations and maintenance of water systems. 8 participants were from Samburu County’s operation and maintenance team, and 4 were from Mercy Corps’ water team. Training sessions emphasized the importance of both the practical and the theoretical reasons behind the adoption of technology to make management of rural water systems more efficient. Participants were trained on the utility of sensors and how this technology can be used to take action in order to avoid systems falling into disrepair. Whether it be anticipatory action from early warning data, or actionable insights on decision-making to keep boreholes functioning, the theory behind technology adoption affirms the overall goal of improving water service delivery to secure safe drinking water.
On the practical side, Virridy demonstrated the sensors, solar panels used for power, and the communications package where data collected through sensors transmitted via satellite signal is uploaded and stored on a cloud-based platform. In real time, the county water operations and maintenance team can see which boreholes are functioning properly and which ones are down via an online dashboard. The 15 selected boreholes were chosen in conjunction with the county water department, prioritizing boreholes that are most frequently used and where the USAID Nawiri program already had an existing footprint.
While technological adoption adds efficiency to water systems management, local knowledge remains imperative to combating water insecurity. Understanding of local hydrogeology, such as precipitation inputs, recharge, water withdrawals, changes in aquifer storage and surface water outflows, are also necessary. In the current environment, their utility is undermined by a lack of reliable data on actual water use. Together, this communal knowledge and insight into water use pave the way for prompt and informed decision making for localized planning and preventive maintenance.
Shared knowledge and information exchange must be a part of the resilience framework. Our team recommended the development of a learning package to share with the broader Samburu County water partners and other key stakeholders on how technological adoption transforms a muddled and inadequate system into an efficient and sustainable one. Training more specialists to install and monitor the borehole sensors will be key to expanding the pilot to reach more boreholes in the area.
Policy matters too. The existing operations and management team should be included within the county-wide policy framework to embed support mechanisms and funding to ensure continued operations. From our partnership with local experts, we have seen technology transform systems of disrepair and poor maintenance. The pilot points to a bright future of lessening the burden on a vulnerable population that continues to experience threats to their daily life and livelihoods due to water insecurity. To secure water is to secure social, economic, and physical wellbeing. Adequate governance of water systems is a major step to get there.
