Innovating with GIS Technologies: Emerging Insights from Countries on Expanding Access to Clean Water
By Pooja Bapat
Photo by Nathan Dumlao
Since the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, government agencies have used digital tools and technologies to support decision-making. More recently, tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which create, manage, analyze, and map all types of data, have become increasingly popular. And the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated their use, with recent innovative GIS applications ranging from the John Hopkins’ COVID-19 dashboard to the Pan American Health Organization’s (PAHO)’s spatio-temporal analysis of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Amazon region to the World Health Organization’s use of GIS tools for contract tracing in Zimbabwe.
One area of sustainable development where GIS is receiving significant attention is around SDG 6 (clean water and sanitation). Nearly two billion people globally still lack access to safely managed drinking water, and recent data shows that the world is not on track to meet SDG 6 by 2030.
Advantages of Using GIS for Sustainable Development
GIS provides decision-makers with many advantages. For instance, GIS allows users to organize, visualize, and analyze different layers of data via maps to better understand trends, uncover patterns, and monitor changes, facilitating better evidence-informed decision-making. Additionally, it simplifies the data organization and management process by enabling the ability to process and organize geographic data from a variety of data sources and integrate it into a centrally-located map. Users reading the map can select the data necessary for a specific project or task and come back to it at any time. Furthermore, GIS can help identify marginalized and vulnerable communities that are often missed by traditional data sources alone.
In terms of addressing water scarcity, with GIS, government agencies can assess a multitude of factors impacting access to clean water ranging from water break points to groundwater recharge. Additionally, due to the miniaturization of GIS technologies, remote sensors can also be embedded in existing water infrastructure, such as hand pumps or river beds, to collect data on water quality or hand pump usage. This allows for remote data collection and monitoring in real-time without having to deploy workers to various water source points to collect this data, saving both time and resources.
How Countries are Using GIS to Tackle SDG 6
Mapping Access to Water in Rwanda and Zambia
Determining which communities have access to water is critical for allocating funding for water infrastructure and resources. However, government agencies often undercount the number of communities with access to clean drinking water. To help address this issue in Rwanda and Zambia, World Vision is using GIS, in combination with machine learning and high-resolution satellite imagery to develop maps that visualize the distribution of water access, among other critical population indicators. Their findings suggest that 40% and 77% percent of the population live beyond the prescribed distance to an improved water point.
Detecting Hand Pump Usage and Determining Where to Build Handpumps in Sub-Saharan African
A widely used tool in expanding access to water in drought-prone areas is utilizing groundwater. For instance, the widespread installation of handpumps across Africa and Asia starting in the 1980s led to one billion people gaining access to clean water. Unfortunately, ensuring that handpumps continue to operate is difficult, especially in rural areas, and it has been reported that about 25 to 40 percent of handpumps are no longer functional. Thus, GIS-based remote sensors can be used to detect when water stops flowing from hand pumps for extended periods and dispatch workers to fix the pump. For instance, in rural Kenya, the “smart handpump” piloted by the University of Oxford was able to decrease the average time to repair a pump from 27 days to 3 days.
Many policymakers are also faced with deciding where to build water pumps and drilling sites. For more effective decision-making, GIS can be employed to analyze terrain and land qualities. For instance, in many areas across Sub-Saharan Africa, groundwater is often located in areas with high hydrogeological complexity and is prone to contamination. By using GIS, UNICEF created groundwater suitability maps in Ethiopia and Madagascar to address the lack of access to water and overlayed hydrogeological, meteorological, and geophysical data to more effectively plan drilling sites. As a result, they increased drilling success rates by more than 40% in Ethiopia, and in Madagascar, the groundwater suitability map is being used to effectively identify drilling sites.
Visualizing Changes in Water Quality in India
An emerging trend in GIS is the ability to model data in real-time, allowing decision-makers to instantly collect and visualize patterns in spatial data. In terms of water pollution, this enables government agencies to visualize changes in water quality over time given external factors, such as land use change, the environment, and weather patterns, as well as minimize the risk of waterborne diseases. For instance, in Central India in the state of Chhattisgarh, the Chhattisgarh Council of Science and Technology (CCOST) in collaboration with the National Remote Sensing Center, and the Indian Space Research Organization implemented GIS technologies to develop a groundwater quality map for the state's 27 districts. Water samples from each site were collected and tested for a number of factors, including pH, alkalinity, arsenic, chloride, and nitrate. Each water source was given a unique code to generate a water quality map, which helped decision-makers better understand spatial patterns associated with groundwater contamination to improve mitigation efforts, as well as determine when to stop water extraction from contaminated sites.
Looking Ahead
As demonstrated by the above examples, there are a myriad of aspects that factor into decision-making around SDG 6, and GIS has become a formidable tool in the fight for universal access to clean drinking water. Yet, despite its many advantages, there are challenges that inhibit GIS adoption, particularly in developing countries, including resource constraints and a lack of awareness. GIS technologies are expensive and include a high upfront cost given the need for GIS infrastructure, which includes hardware, software, and staff who are trained in using these technologies to build and operate GIS models. Additionally, oftentimes the full benefits of GIS are not realized until years later, which can impact political will for financing these technologies.
To work towards overcoming these challenges, building multi-stakeholder partnerships in developing countries and establishing peer-to-peer country knowledge exchange on the use of GIS are important steps towards fully realizing GIS benefits, especially for achieving universal access to clean water. With stakeholders convening this week for World Water Week and the upcoming UN Water Conference in March of next year, I remain hopeful that innovative data collection and monitoring strategies, particularly GIS, will continue to play an important role in ensuring that access to clean and safe drinking water is available for all in the years to come.