Groundwater, growth and governance: water access in Kisumu

Typical plot in Manyatta. Source: Sustainable Sanitation Alliance Flickr

Kisumu is Kenya’s third largest city and the heart of life on Lake Victoria. Much like Kibera, its history has been closely affected by Kenya’s colonial past. The lifting of restrictions on rural-urban migration in 1963 saw the city’s population grow five-fold in twenty years. Such rapid demographic change placed demands on the city’s water resources that could not be met by the municipal council. 

In Drangert et al’s (2002) paper, on which much of this post is based, the authors note that the local authorities struggled to maintain the city’s piped network, and that it soon began to decline in much the same way as the supplies of those cities studied in DWII. It appears that in the years since water provision has been privatised with a view to improving its commercial viability (see KIWASCO). 

With the deterioration of the piped network local residents turned to the ground beneath their feet to make up the shortfall. By 1999 over 379 hand-dug wells had emerged in the peri urban areas of Manyatta and Migosi, supplying an estimated 664,000 m3/year through local kiosks and vendors.

The immediate question that arises is that of sustainability. MacDonald et al (2012) argue that there is an insufficient availability of high-yielding boreholes in Africa for the predication of rapid urbanisation based on groundwater supplies. However, evidence from MacDonald and Davies (2000) suggests that yields upwards of 5 m3/day are often encountered in fractured basement geology of the type present in Manyatta and Migosi. For perspective the average reported daily abstraction per well in these areas as of 2014 is 0.76m3 and 0.81m3, respectively (see Okotto et al 2015). 

Potential contamination hazards for water in hand-dug wells. Source: Stirling Conservation Science

The other crucial factor here is sanitation. As the above diagram demonstrates there are many risks to the safety of water abstracted from hand-dug wells. One key threat, as mentioned briefly last week, is that of seepage from non-flushing toilets. Drangert et al recognise one possible solution to this in the existence of local “water communities”, groups who are coming together to develop piped networks deriving from the boreholes in their areas. These initiatives could lead to greater standards of hygiene and sanitation, although there is no guarantee that they would result in reduced source contamination.