Monitoring groundwater use as a domestic water source by urban households: Analysis of data from Lagos State, Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa with implications for policy and practice

Danert, Kerstin and Healy, Adrian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5336-0147 2021. Monitoring groundwater use as a domestic water source by urban households: Analysis of data from Lagos State, Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa with implications for policy and practice. Water 13 (4) , 568. 10.3390/w13040568

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Abstract

The fundamental importance of groundwater for urban drinking water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly recognised. However, little is known about the trends in urban groundwater development by individual households and its role in securing safely-managed drinking water supplies. Anecdotal evidence indicates a thriving self-supply movement to exploit groundwater in some urban sub-Saharan African settings, but empirical evidence, or analysis of the benefits and drawbacks, remains sparse. Through a detailed analysis of official datasets for Lagos State, Nigeria we examine the crucial role played by groundwater and, specifically, by household self-supply for domestic water provision. We then set this in the context of Nigeria and of sub-Saharan Africa. One of the novelties of this multi-scalar approach is that it provides a granular understanding from large-scale datasets. Our analysis confirms the importance of non-piped water supplies in meeting current and future drinking water demand by households in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the role played, through self-supply, by groundwater. Our results demonstrate inconsistencies between datasets, and we make recommendations for the future. We argue that a key actor in the provision of drinking water supplies, the individual household, is largely overlooked by officially reported data, with implications for both policy and practice.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	MDPI
ISSN:	2073-4441
Funders:	MRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 February 2021
Date of Acceptance:	17 February 2021
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 08:32
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/138642

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