Description
Owing to its relatively stable yield of high-quality water, groundwater has emerged as an extremely important water resource for meeting domestic, industrial, agricultural and environmental demands. Although groundwater is often relatively well protected from pollution, poor management has resulted in negative impacts such as declining aquifer heads, quality deterioration, and irrational abstraction rates. Uganda has approximately 40,000 deep boreholes, 30,000 protected springs, and 16,000 shallow wells. A total of 73 of the 98 operational water supply systems are dependent on groundwater, accounting for around 75% of all towns and cities. In Kampala City, several industries are reliant on groundwater, including mineral water and chemical industries. The indiscriminate disposal of industrial waste to the ground, coupled with over abstraction by high yielding electric pumps necessitates a renewed focus on groundwater monitoring. This study examined efforts by several actors undertaking groundwater monitoring, using data loggers, smart sensors, and other telemetric real-time monitoring systems. Major findings from the study reveal that monitoring data is generated across a range of stakeholders in public, private, and non-profit sectors, with efforts largely uncoordinated. The data is rarely stored for future use as it is lost along the way. The study recommends that the different stakeholders develop a coordinated and clear data collection, storage, and retrieval system and a systematic database and arrangement for data sharing via the internet be established. The research concludes that there is clearly an unmet need; hence a national effort to track groundwater monitoring data over the long-term is vital given its wide applicability to water resource issues commonly faced by hydrologists, engineers, regulators, and resource managers. It calls for an immediate establishment of a more rigorous and systematic nationwide approach to groundwater monitoring, clearly an elusive goal thus far. The time is right for progress towards this goal.
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