The UPGro programme, supported by AfriWatSan & ESPRC, conducted a pan-African capacity-strengthening and knowledge co-production workshop at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro, Tanzania from the 10th to 12th of February, 2017. 40 participants from 12 countries in Africa took part and analysed multi-decadal, groundwater-level data (“chronicles”) from 9 countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger, Sénégal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Participants comprised PhD students and more experienced researchers (mentors & supervisors) as well as representatives from government ministries and the private sector, and included team members from all 5 UPGro consortium projects GroFutures, BRAVE, Hidden Crisis, GroForGood, and T-Group. Training focused on the application of the water table fluctuation method for analysing groundwater-level records and was led by GroFutures and The Chronicles Consortium, an international consortium of scientists from across Africa and beyond collating and analysing multi-decadal records of groundwater levels in order to assess the impacts of groundwater use, climate variability and change, and land-use change on groundwater storage across Africa. In addition to addressing key capacity-strengthening goals, the workshop provided a platform for the co-production of knowledge. As a result, a collaborative, pan-African analysis of multi-decadal groundwater-level records is in preparation and a number of participants is expected to contribute their national-scale analyses to an upcoming special section of Hydrogeology Journal.
Workshop participants: