Improving Access to Clean Drinking Water in sub-Saharan Africa

In May 2008 and 2009 a group of undergraduate Environmental Studies students and two professors from the University of Redlands worked on a project to improve access drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa. They used GPS equipment and GIS programming to map and classify water access sites in the Mayange, located in one of the poorest areas of Rwanda. The team also wanted the project to aid the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in their plans to reduce the population of people without access to safe drinking. The MDG needed to establish the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) when they were not seeing faster improvements in water access in sub-Saharan Africa, this new organization focused on Mayange and 79 other areas to improve their access to safe drinking water.



Over a 15 day period the team gathered GPS points from water access points, such as wells and cisterns, and input the data into a database they created. The database included all water sources, and with the GPS points they classified each point with a site (shallow pit, open pit, etc.). Using this information the team was able to see where they needed to add new water sources, hoping to accomplish MVP's goal of having one source within 1 kilometer of each household. The MVP science coordinator for Mayange, holds onto the data, and her team uses the data to evaluate the distance between villages and clean water sources and other indicators when dealing with planning for new sources.

http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0910articles/improving-access.html

Isabella Vargas