This paper presents new experiences in the province of Andahuaylas, in the Andes of Peru, in a bid to help solve the problem of water supply in rural scattered areas. The central part of the document consists of a study that describes and analyzes the process by which 5 small areas in a scattered rural steeply sloping side of a mountain managed to acquire a sustainable water supply operated by gravity. The study includes 3 chapters. The first chapter examines the water issues in the communities, what solutions developed by the commoners to stock up on water, what are the drawbacks of the traditional system of their drinking water system. The second chapter describes technical aspects of the project, explaining how the technologies employed were the product of the physical and social environment. The third chapter describes the community participation during and after the project.

This report identifies opportunities and challenges for local financing of water utilities in Peru and suggests recommendations for removing barriers and creating incentives for scaling-up local financing to local water utilities. It was developed with an understanding that meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in water and sanitation in Peru will require scaling up local financing for the sector and that efficiency and effectiveness can be enhanced by greater involvement of local institutional investors and other parties. This joint study exposes many of the barriers to local private financing facing the urban water supply and sewerage (WS&S) sector in Peru. In short, the majority of local water utilities cannot meet credit rating and governance standards required to access private financing. Consequently, loans from financial markets are rare. These findings are probably not specific to Peru. Accordingly, there is great value for central governments to undertake similarly detailed studies to identify the obstacles preventing access to local financing unique to their country's WS&S sector. | Este informe identifica oportunidades y retos para el financiamiento local de las Empresas de Agua (EPS) en Perú y sugiere recomendaciones para eliminar las barreras y crear los incentivos que permitan expandir el financiamiento local a las EPS. Fue desarrollado partiendo de la premisa de que el logro de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio en Perú, en materia de agua y saneamiento, requerirá la expansión del financiamiento privado al sector; asimismo, que es posible incrementar la eficacia y la eficiencia de las EPS por medio de una mayor participación de inversores institucionales locales y otros actores.

Groundwater is an extensive, concealed and inaccessible resource, and (in contrast to surface water) changes in quantity and quality are often very slow processes occurring below large land areas. These changes cannot be determined by simple one-off snapshot surveys alone, and require more elaborate monitoring networks and data interpretation. The primary goal of aquifer management is to control the impacts of groundwater abstraction and contaminant loads, and monitoring aquifer response and quality trends provide key inputs for this goal. The evaluation of groundwater issues and the implementation of management solutions require hydrogeological data that are in part baseline and in part time-variant in character-the collection of the time-variant component is what is usually considered groundwater monitoring. Groundwater monitoring thus comprises the collection, analysis and storage of a range of data on a regular basis according to specific circumstances and objectives.

In sub-Saharan Africa, low-cost groundwater supply systems offer great opportunities for the current unserved population of >300 million to access drinking water. A comparative study was performed in Uganda of the EMAS Pump (designed by Escuela Móvil Aguas y Saneamiento Básico) with the trade-named Rope Pump, two low-cost manual water-lifting devices appropriate to pumping from shallow groundwater sources. Pumping rates, energy expended, material costs, and construction requirements were analyzed. Focus was on low-cost application for use in shallow groundwater systems at the household level in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The study site was northern Uganda, with testing performed at several drilled boreholes. Two variants of each pump were tested by a male and female user, pumping from multiple static water-level depths ranging from 5 to 28 m. Results demonstrated the most common version of the EMAS Pump to perform similarly to the comparable version of the Rope Pump in terms of average pumping rate at depth range 5 to 18 m (93–111%), but less so at deeper depths (63–85%). Normalized pumping rates (considering energy expended) accentuated differences between these versions of the EMAS Pump and Rope Pump (47–97%). Cost of materials to construct the EMAS Pump were 21–60% those of the Rope Pump, and EMAS Pump construction requirements were also less. Based on the assessed factors, it is concluded that the EMAS Pump has potential for success in “self-supply” groundwater systems in sub-Saharan Africa and is particularly appropriate to link with low-cost shallow groundwater sources.

The note highlights the importance of stakeholder participation in groundwater management, because groundwater stakeholders are those who have an important interest in the resources of a specified aquifer. This may be because they use groundwater, or because they practice activities that could cause groundwater pollution, or because they are concerned with groundwater resource and environmental management. Since surface water should be managed conjunctively with groundwater, and municipal or industrial wastewater may pose a threat to groundwater quality, stakeholders should also (where appropriate) include municipal, and industrial representatives. Stakeholder participation in groundwater management is essential for the following reasons: management decisions taken unilaterally by the regulatory agency without social consensus, are often impossible to implement; it enables essential management activities to be carried out more effectively and economically through cooperative efforts, and shared burdens; and, it facilitates the integration and coordination of decisions relating to groundwater resources, land use, and waste management. Groundwater management decisions taken with the participation of stakeholders should help to bring: social benefits, because they tend to promote equity among users; economic benefits, because they tend to optimize pumping and reduce energy costs; technical benefits, because they usually lead to better estimates of water abstraction. On the other hand, participatory management of highly-stressed aquifers should help take some, otherwise, unpopular decisions where-at least in the short run-benefits to a number of stakeholder groups are decreased, because they agree to reduce pumping in the longer-term communal interest.