Mali - West Africa, A Community Water Supply Project

Catlow Shipek, WMG's Senior Watershed Specialist, is assisting the University of Arizona Student Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-UA) with a community-based project in Mandoli, Mali. Catlow and another EWB-UA student recently completed a community assessment trip in early June. Mandoli is a small agriculture-based community located along the remote Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, or ‘Dogon Country’ as western tourists know it. Mali straddles the transition known as the Sahel that is between the arid Saharan desert to the north and more humid climates to the south. Mali is a diverse country consisting of dozens of ethnicities, rich in culture and tradition, and providing many world-renowned musical artists including the late Ali Farke Toure.

Community members predominantly speak a dialect of Dogon, a handful also speak the regional language Bambara, and only a couple know some French. The community has requested assistance to improve their dire water supply issues which are most evident these final months of the 9-month dry season. During our visit in June, the water supply was at its lowest with the rains still a month away. Men, women, and children all work together to supply enough water to their families and herding animals. This region typically receives on average 500mm (20inches) of rain from June to September. The communities food resources for the year rely on a productive harvest from this short intensive growing season utilizing every square meter of soil available.

Past aid projects have installed a number of open wells drilled deep into the sandstone bedrock. Growing and shifting populations strain the existing water supply during the dry season when demand exceeds the recharge rate. Several villages within the community travel up to 3km twice a day to obtain water for all their household and livestock needs. Other issues are realized upon inspection. Sanitation being one, only two toilets exist in the community, a pit latrine at the Peace Corps Volunteer’s house, and another pit latrine at the new primary school. Another issue being education, education is a convenience that few families can afford to have their children attend.

We conducted a rapid community assessment looking at water usage, water quality, sanitation, health, income, family characteristics, community structures, community organizations, and more. The information we collected will be presented to the larger EWB-UA team back in Tucson. From this information we will work together with the community of Mandoli to develop a strategic plan to help them resolve their water supply issues. One alternative may be to utilize rooftop rainwater harvesting practices. Some members of the community already informally practice rooftop catchment using buckets to collect runoff from their mud roofs. However, this water is of poor quality due to the mud surfaces and collection is limited to the size of a bucket. The villagers simply state that the lack of tools and resources prohibit them from better utilizing this water source.

The development of a catchment and storage system applicable to this region presents several challenges. First, long-term storage requires careful protection and management of the collected rainwater. Second, the cost of the materials must be affordable to a community consisting primarily of subsistence farmers with limited monetary income. Our efforts to help the community of Mandoli will take a multi-pronged approach:

1. develop and deliver educational resources focusing on issues of water, sanitation, and health specific to the community
2. improve the quality of existing water sources for drinking purposes and
3. develop sustainable alternatives to increasing water supply.

The EWB-UA team is quickly moving forward with planning and technical development and of course fundraising. Financial donations assist the all volunteer team in reaching out to a community to ensure everyone has a right to safe, clean drinking water.

India Assessment Trip

Watershed Management Group is developing its international programs and two of its founding members have moved to India to open the first branch office. Jared Buono and Sowmya Somnath are a husband and wife team that have been with WMG since its inception in 2003. They recently relocated to Chennai and are currently conducting a program assessment tour of the country where they are visiting other organizations, agencies and communities.

By meeting with different communities, and the organizations they work with, WMG's hopes to build a strong network, identify potential partners, learn from the experience of others, and investigate different types of organizational structures, approaches to development and philosophies of service.

Over the next few months Jared and Sowmya will be posting news, stories and photos from their tour. We invite you to follow their journey, and watch WMG grow.

Treating drinking water for flouride, arsenic and salinity

Many people in India lack access to a safe and reliable source of drinking water. Water borne diseases are common in many areas, and are the result of contamination of water sources, but geology is also a constraint to clean water. High levels of flouride, arsenic and salts are naturally found in many aquifers throughout the country. These can cause both acute and chronic health problems, and in some cases the ground water is not even potable.


Reverse osmosis (RO) is one of the options for treating contaminated water and has been used to provide drinking water in rural areas (www.Sarvajal.com is a great example and deserves its own blog post... we'll get to it one of these days). The challenge with RO is that there are some high costs associated with initial investment and maintenance. Waste water is also a problem as over half of the water treated may be lost as waste. In areas where total dissolved solids (TDS) are high treatment efficiency may be as low as 30%, what does one do with the remaining 70% of salty water? We visited one location in the Mehwat District of Harayana where salts in the shallow aquifer exhibited a TDS of over 30,000 parts per million (ppm). That's more salty than seawater!

An alternative to RO is solar distillation which relies on the sun's energy to evaporate water, leaving the impurities behind, where the vapor is condensed and collected as pure water. Its so pure that salts or minerals need to be added- it turns out that humans need a minimum TDS as well. The other issue with solar distillation is capacity. The type of unit pictured here (built by IRRAD) produces about 4 liters of water per day for every 1 square meter of surface area. IRRAD is testing an approach to use a parabolic reflector to harness more of the sun's energy to increase evaporation and therefore increase capacity but it is still under testing.

There apparently are a few other technologies to treating for arsenic, flouride or salts but we have yet to visit any in action. It is on our list however.

Another approach entirely is to identify new sources of water. For example, finding fresh water pockets in the aquifer nearby, or rainwater harvesting. More on this in a future post.