Monitoring Groundwater Use as a Domestic Water Source by Urban Households: Analysis of Data from Lagos State, Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa with Implications for Policy and Practice

The fundamental importance of groundwater for urban drinking water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly recognised. However, little is known about the trends in urban groundwater development by individual households and its role in securing safely-managed drinking water supplies. Anecdotal evidence indicates a thriving self-supply movement to exploit groundwater in some urban sub-Saharan African settings, but empirical evidence, or analysis of the benefits and drawbacks, remains sparse. Through a detailed analysis of official datasets for Lagos State, Nigeria we examine the crucial role played by groundwater and, specifically, by household self-supply for domestic water provision. We then set this in the context of Nigeria and of sub-Saharan Africa. One of the novelties of this multi-scalar approach is that it provides a granular understanding from large-scale datasets. Our analysis confirms the importance of non-piped water supplies in meeting current and future drinking water demand by households in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the role played, through self-supply, by groundwater. Our results demonstrate inconsistencies between datasets, and we make recommendations for the future. We argue that a key actor in the provision of drinking water supplies, the individual household, is largely overlooked by officially reported data, with implications for both policy and practice.