The successful and sustainable development of groundwater resources in Africa is critical to future economic growth and food security on the continent, as well as providing safe, reliable water supplies for many of the hundreds of millions of people who don’t yet have them. However, much of the data and information that already exists about groundwater in Africa is not available to the people who could make use of it. This project aims to address that problem.
A hydrogeological report for Chad from 1972. BGS © UKRI.
The Africa Groundwater Literature Archive is a searchable, online database that so far catalogues nearly 7000 references for literature about groundwater in Africa. These references deal with hydrogeology, geology, hydrology and other related disciplines, and include:
- published scientific articles
- conference papers
- manuals
- maps
It also includes hundreds of previously hard-to-access reports from groundwater exploration and development projects carried out by BGS and other organisations since the 1970s or even earlier. As many as possible of the documents are freely available to download.
Making information more accessible
This is the most comprehensive catalogue of groundwater literature for Africa available yet. Thousands of the documents are freely available to download, so long as a digital copy exists and copyright restrictions allow. For others, such as journal articles that aren’t open access, a link is provided to the online abstract. In total, more than 3000 of the indexed documents are linked to either the full text document or an abstract available online.
The archive can also be searched geographically, by themed keywords or by a free text search of title and author. More than 1200 of the documents have so far been georeferenced and can be searched using an interactive map. They can also be searched by country; for example, you can quickly find all documents that are about Ghana, or Kenya, or Zimbabwe. The keywords allow the groundwater documents to be searched by topics such as aquifer type, water quality, borehole drilling, irrigation or groundwater modelling.
More than a century of groundwater information
The oldest document in the archive is the First Annual Report of the Geological Commission 1896, which was published 1897 by the Department of Agriculture in the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. Pages relevant to water are available to download. The newest documents were published in 2015.
The documents cover all imaginable aspects of groundwater: from geological maps to papers on numerical hydrogeological modelling; from National Water Master Plans to reports of drilling water boreholes in a single village in Tanzania; from how-to manuals for geophysical siting of boreholes to detailed investigations of industrial pollution and sea-water intrusion in coastal cities in West Africa.
Future improvements
We know that there are many more reports, scientific papers and other documents out there: more and more information is also being produced every month by governments, non-governmental organisations, the private sector and research organisations. If you have, or know of, useful groundwater reports or other documents that could be included in the archive, please get in touch! Whether they are digital (either already available online or only on your computer) or are paper copy only: if they have information about groundwater in Africa then they are useful to somebody, somewhere!
The first step is indexing them and entering a bibliographical reference into the archive so that everyone knows they exist. We can then look at whether it’s possible to make them available digitally through the archive.
Where have all these documents been hiding up to now?
Published journal articles are increasingly available online through publishers’ websites, although it is often necessary to pay for access to them (except for abstracts, which are usually freely available to view), but it can be hard to find articles about a specific place or topic. Cataloguing the articles in the Africa Groundwater Literature Archive means they can be searched by themed keyword and by location, making it easier to find relevant information.
A lot of unpublished literature, such as reports written by geological surveys and water ministries in African countries, is only available in hard copy form and is often hidden away on dusty shelves and in old filing cabinets. This is sometimes called ‘grey literature’. Many such reports have been collected over the years by BGS hydrogeologists, often during many years work with government departments in countries such as Malawi and Botswana. Through services such as the Africa Groundwater Literature Archive and the SADC Groundwater Grey Literature Archive, many of these documents have been digitised and are available to search and download. This makes years of painstaking work by geologists and hydrogeologists in the past available to those working today, saving effort and resources, and helping to maximise groundwater development work.
Why is this project important?
The availability and accessibility of robust groundwater data and information is both a major constraint to developing groundwater resources across Africa and an additional barrier to undertaking research. The primary aim of this project is to provide detailed and appropriate information on African groundwater resources to a range of stakeholders. The project builds on work undertaken to develop the SADC Groundwater Grey Literature Archive, making previously hard-to-access grey literature available for the SADC region.
The Africa Groundwater Literature Archive will be of use to different stakeholders:
- hydrogeologists and other practitioners developing groundwater supplies who are looking for information and data on groundwater conditions in specific regions or countries
- researchers looking for information and data on African groundwater to support their investigations
- policymakers and decision makers who need an overview of groundwater conditions and issues in a country
The development and publication of the archive will also involve many African groundwater scientists and be a platform to both publicise their knowledge and to deposit and secure their research and data.
Contact
Please contact BGS enquiries (enquiries@bgs.ac.uk) for further information.