Know Your Water: Citizen Science and Community Participation in Three African Countries

Bastien Linol of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa will develop a platform for crowd-sourced monitoring of surface water and groundwater by local communities in rural areas of South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. Through collaboration across the three countries, the platform will enable geoscientists to work together with local communities to characterize the availability and quality of water sources. The research teams will train local community members as citizen scientists to collect information on water sources and take weekly samples, with data entered into a mobile application. Together with geochemical analysis of the samples, the data will be entered into a database with an interactive website for user-friendly geographic analysis and reporting back to communities. This platform for participatory science will empower local communities to make recommendations to governmental water and sanitation agencies, helping solve the water-related challenges posed by climate change.