WaTER Center doctoral student Philip Deal and center
director and CEES professor David Sabatini travelled to Ghana in July. The purpose of the trip was twofold – to
evaluate a private company’s abilities to manufacture drilling equipment, train
professional drilling teams and provide a full water delivery service to rural
communities in Ghana and attend the 39th Water Engineering and Development
Centre International Conference in Kumasi, Ghana, to share details of their collaboration
model with the academic community.
The WaTER Center, the Water4 Foundation and IDEA
are collaborating with Access Development Ltd., a privately held Ghanaian
company located in the western region of the country. In addition to providing a full water
delivery service to rural communities in Ghana, ADL will manufacture drilling
equipment and train professional drilling teams who will dig and maintain
boreholes so that contracted villages will have clean water year round.
Finally, ADL will charge a miniscule tariff for these services upfront in order
to recover the costs for service and prevent the breakdown of the ADL
infrastructure. All of these actions combine to form a service delivery model,
a concept under research at the University of the University of Oxford and IRC.
The rural water delivery service began last fall,
and its initial implementation is expected to last four years. Phase 1, which
included preliminary planning, mobilization, and baseline studies, was recently
finished in April. Phases 2 and 3, which include training and the start of
drilling, will proceed this year.
The WaTER Center will evaluate the company from
technological, financial, and behavioral perspectives. Baseline studies are well along to completion.
Deal and Sabatini will address the efficacy of the project to date as well as
hopes for the future at the WEDC conference.
Over the next few years, metrics such as well performance, maintenance
periods, operational costs, water purchasing rates, and how the socioeconomic
framework affects the company’s success will be tracked to evaluate the
sustainability of the project. The WaTER Center is excited to play a role in helping
to determine if this is the next step in public-private partnerships in
emerging regions. Stay tuned!
