Abstract：

Poor urban dwellers tend to be disadvantaged in terms of public service delivery, often relying instead on groundwater through self-supply, but their specific needs and opportunities – and own level of responsibility – are seldom on the agenda. Ghana and Greater Accra serve to illustrate many interconnected aspects of urbanization, inadequate service provision, peri-urban dwellers’ conditions, private actors’ involvement, and user preferences for packaged water. Based on interviews and a household survey covering 300 respondents, this case study provides insights into the water-related practices and preferences of residents in the peri-urban, largely unplanned township of Dodowa on the Accra Plains in Ghana, and to discuss implications of low accountability and a complex governance landscape on the understanding of reliance on groundwater.
Dodowa residents were self-sufficient from wells and boreholes until a distribution network expansion was completed in 2014, with international companies such as Siemens and the China Ghazouba Group involved in the construction. Today, they take a ‘combinator approach’ to access water from different sources. The findings suggest that piped water supplies just over half the population while the District Assembly and individuals add ever-more groundwater abstraction points. Sachet water completes the picture of a low-income area that is comparatively well off in terms of water access. However, with parallel bodies tasked with water provisioning and governance, the reliance on wells and boreholes among poor (peri-) urban users has for long been lost in aggregate statistics, making those accountable unresponsive to strategic planning requirements for groundwater as a resource, and to those using it.

About the speaker：

Dr Jenny Gr?nwall is an interdisciplinary researcher with the Water Governance Facility at the Stockholm International Water Institute, SIWI, with a background in environmental law and long experience from working in India. Dr Gr?nwall is presently part of an International Technical Expert Team on water quality for the EU-China Environmental Sustainability Programme with MEP FECO, and involved in a 4-year study on the Indian textile industry as well as in research on groundwater governance for the urban poor in Ghana as part of the UPGro Programme (https://upgro.org/).