Local scale water-food nexus: Use of borehole-garden permaculture to realise the full potential of rural water supplies in Malawi.

Local-scale opportunities to address challenges of the water-food nexus in the developing world need to be embraced. Borehole-garden permaculture is advocated as one such opportunity that involves the sustainable use of groundwater spilt at hand-pump operated borehole supplies that is otherwise wasted. Spilt water may also pose health risks when accumulating as a stagnant pond. Rural village community use of this grey-water in permaculture projects to irrigate borehole gardens is proposed to primarily provide economic benefit whereby garden-produce revenue helps fund borehole water-point maintenance. Water-supply sustainability, increased food/nutrition security, health protection from malaria, and business opportunity benefits may also arise. Our goal has been to develop an, experience-based, framework for delivery of sustainable borehole-garden permaculture and associated benefits. This is based upon data collection and permaculture implementation across the rural Chikwawa District of Malawi during 2009-17. We use, stakeholder interviews to identify issues influencing uptake, gathering of stagnant pond occurrence data to estimate amelioration opportunity, quantification of permaculture profitability to validate economic potential, and critical assessment of recent permaculture uptake to identify continuing problems. Permaculture was implemented at 123 sites representing 6% of District water points, rising to 26% local area coverage. Most implementations were at, or near, newly drilled community-supply boreholes; hence, amelioration of prevalent stagnant ponds elsewhere remains a concern. The envisaged benefits of permaculture were manifest and early data affirm projected garden profitability and spin-off benefits of water-point banking and community micro-loan access. However, a diversity of technical, economic, social and governance issues were found to influence uptake and performance. Example issues include greater need for improved bespoke garden design input, on-going project performance assessment, and coordinated involvement of multi-sector governmental-development bodies to underpin the integrated natural-resource management required. The developed framework aims to manage the identified issues and requires the concerted action of all stakeholders. Based on the probable ubiquity of underlying issues, the framework is expected to be generalizable to the wider developing world. However, this particular application of permaculture represents a fraction of its greater potential opportunity for rural communities that should be explored.

Risk assessment to groundwater of pit latrine rural sanitation policy in developing country settings.

Parallel global rise in pit-latrine sanitation and groundwater-supply provision is of concern due to the frequent spatial proximity of these activities. Study of such an area in Malawi has allowed understanding of risks posed to groundwater from the recent implementation of a typical developing-country pit-latrine sanitation policy to be gained. This has assisted the development of a risk-assessment framework approach pragmatic to regulatory-practitioner management of this issue. The framework involves water-supply and pit-latrine mapping, monitoring of key groundwater contamination indicators and surveys of possible environmental site-condition factors and culminates in an integrated statistical evaluation of these datasets to identify the significant factors controlling risks posed. Our approach usefully establishes groundwater-quality baseline conditions of a potentially emergent issue for the study area. Such baselines are foundational to future trend discernment and contaminant natural attenuation verification critical to policies globally. Attribution of borehole contamination to pit-latrine loading should involve, as illustrated, the use of the range of contamination (chemical, microbiological) tracers available recognising none are ideal and several radial and capture-zone metrics that together may provide a weight of evidence. Elevated, albeit low-concentration, nitrate correlated with some radial metrics and was tentatively suggestive of emerging latrine influences. Longer term monitoring is, however, necessary to verify that the commonly observed latrine-borehole separation distances (29-58m), alongside statutory guidelines, do not constitute significant risk. Borehole contamination was limited and correlation with various environmental-site condition factors also limited. This was potentially ascribed to effectiveness of attenuation to date, monitoring of an emergent problem yet to manifest, or else contamination from other sources. High borehole usage and protective wall absence correlated with observed microbiological contamination incidence, but could relate to increased human/animal activity close to these poorly protected boreholes. Additional to factors assessed, a groundwater-vulnerability factor is recommended that critically relies upon improved proactive securing of underpinning data during borehole/latrine installations. On-going concerns are wide ranging, including poorly constrained pit-latrine input, difficulties in assessing in-situ plume natural attenuation and possible disposal of used motor oils to latrines.