Rebecca Alowo
This piece proposes a need to strengthen sustainable monitoring approaches to better take account of ongoing threats though the use of ICT/ Mobile phones, to ensure sustained access to water supply to vulnerable communities.
In sub-Saharan Africa low functionality of water points as been noted as leading to low access of safe water to many communities. This has greatly increased the burden of water borne diseases.
This article is proposed as a result of a need for sector mapping, there is a need to identify non functionality of water points as an obstacle to increased access to equitable water and sanitation, this can be through an ICT project to use mobile phones to update and repair broken down water points.
This will be the rigorous assessment of the causes of failure, and the outputs of the phone will significantly increase the capacity of availability of information to ensure investment in sustainable services that really achieves sustainable lasting water based land use success.
Monitoring is essential because Water resources (Rural water boreholes with hand pumps) and surface water suffer high failure rates. Understanding the causes of these failures is necessary to carry out more effective service provision.
Differential water tables, Low yield and poor water quality are symptomatic of human activity and poor land use, poor siting, construction and materials selection. Underlying causes lie in poor practices of implementing agencies, and especially the lack of competent real-time information for various sustainability actions.
Rebecca Alowo is a DEng student at Central University of Technology Free State South Africa. The writer works as a Senior Consultant Research Studies at Quantum Executive Education. The writer also free lances under Kenyonyozi properties.