Groundwater renewable resources versus demand: 'good news' or 'bad news'for rural communities?

Government water authorities and aid agencies are receiving conflicting messages about
groundwater availability in sub-Saharan Africa. 'Good news' articles suggest that
groundwater is available in abundance. 'Bad news'articles report water-point failure caused
by depletion of groundwater storage rather than the more widely recognized mechanical
failure of pump or borehole structure. These contradictory messages need to be read in
the perspective of the scale of the assessment being described. Although there is plenty of
groundwater in Africa, it is neither evenly distributed nor universally accessible. There are
places where the groundwater resource renewal cannot keep pace with demographic stress
and the local aquifer is drying up; groundwater in Africa is not just a water supply issue but
has also become a complex management, maintenance, and regulatory problem. Lessons
need to be learnt, not least with regard to the sustainable achievement of the Millennium
Development Goals; the key lesson is that government and aid agencies need to recognize
that groundwater is a finite resource of limited capacity