Access to Water – integrated watershed management in Tanzania
Several villages in the Usambara Mountains in Tanzania face pressing water scarcity issues. The local initiative is to create a pipeline. Welt-Weit has inspected the existing pipelines transporting drinking water from the forest to settlements. Christian Hähnlein, a Professor from FH Frankfurt, used collected GPS data to make a digital model of the first section of the pipeline scheme and came up with improvement ideas that could increase the output of drinking water substantially.
The engineering skills needed to connect all the six villages in this mountainous area to a piped water network are a big challenge, but of course to settle the social issues between all the local stakeholders involved is the even bigger challenge. For this reason, the Tanzanians among the experts have come up with some milestones together with the Water User Association that should lay the basis of a truly participatory and transparent watershed management system. This is something that has to come from the local leaders and villagers themselves.
Welt-Weit can only monitor the process. In the meantime, we will continue with the technical support. Professor Hähnlein wants to model the entire pipeline scheme but he needs lots of data, not just GPS points of the entire layout but also flow rate at each distribution point, settlement areas and water consumption peaks.
Welt-Weit is looking for students who would like to make this a part of the master’s or even PhD thesis. They are looking for students who are not afraid to stay for three months in villages and walk long distances through a beautiful but demanding landscape.
If you are interested or you know of someone who would be, get in contact with Welt-Weit.
Contact: info@welt-weit.org
Tel. +49 61 969 739 515