GroFutures: Groundwater Futures in Sub-Saharan Africa

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GroFutures will benefit: (1) poor water users (women and men, rural and urban) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through increased knowledge and evidence of sustainable groundwater use to alleviate poverty through improved resource management and enhanced health and livelihoods; (2) water planners and policy makers in SSA through the development of new evidence and methodologies to enable equitable and sustainable management of groundwater resources; and (3) research communities in SSA and beyond through creating improved new tools, methods and datasets for interdisciplinary analysis of groundwater resources and their management, as well as scholarly information exchanges and networking activities that will strengthen a growing Community of Practice involving Anglophone and Francophone scientists.

The primary pathway by which GroFutures will generate impacts for poor people is through the development of new evidence and tools which water managers in the focal countries and across SSA can use to: (1) target groundwater development where it can most effectively reduce poverty; and (2) ensure equitable and sustainable development of groundwater resources.

GroFutures will contribute to unlocking the poverty-reducing potential of groundwater in SSA by:
1) Establishing a unique Network of African Groundwater Observatories (NAGO) that will generate new evidence on groundwater availability and demand, including insights into how these are likely to change over the next two to three decades giving planners at basin, national and regional levels the information they need to plan for an equitable and sustainable allocation of groundwater for multiple users and uses;
2) Identifying locations in which groundwater development (for domestic supply or irrigation) is a technically appropriate and politically feasible strategy to reduce poverty;
3) Identifying locations at risk of future depletion due to likely demand/supply imbalances enabling appropriate management responses to be developed on a preventive rather than curative basis;
4) Providing specific information on variations in groundwater availability and demand which can carry high costs for economies and for the livelihoods of poor people and make planning and management difficult;
5) Strengthening the capacity of water planners, researchers and their institutions through the co-production of knowledge and collaborative, demand-led research and stakeholder engagement;
6) Identifying governance arrangements for pro-poor, sustainable groundwater management, in collaboration with water managers and other key stakeholders; and
7) Disseminating new evidence and knowledge on the positive outcomes of groundwater development for health and livelihoods enabling poverty alleviation.

The GroFutures team will engage staff of national, regional and local water bureaux in Ethiopia, Niger and Tanzania, as well as basin authorities (Great Ruaha, Niger) as project partners from the start in the research planning, data analysis and tool/metric development and piloting. They will also embed new scientific knowledge, models and methods for managing groundwater for poverty alleviation within water ministries to inform decision-making and initiate discussions about equity in groundwater development among relevant stakeholders.

Production and dissemination of high quality, open-source publications - in the form of academic outputs in high impact journals, as well as targeted policy briefs and other bespoke communications materials suited to different audiences - will be a central aim of the project. These will involve all members of the team and will be published in English, as well as French, Amharic, Hausa and Kiswahili, where appropriate. All materials and information will be accessible via a dedicated, bilingual website (grofutures.org) that is linked to institutional websites of the project team (AAU, BGS, IDS-STEPS, IGRAC, IRD, IWMI, SUA, UAM, UCL, UoS) and the UPGro Knowledge Broker.