The groundwater reserves are 100 times that of the surface. Why do Africans prefer to drink muddy water instead of drilling wells?
When it comes to Africa, the vast savannah and wild environment first come to mind. When the dry season comes, there are a large number of women and children in Africa every day, looking for water sources with big buckets on their heads. They often spend hours and walk more than ten kilometers to find the precious water and bring it home. Most of the water brought home is too turbid to drink directly.
According to statistics, more than 1/3 of the population in Africa has been living in a state of water shortage for a long time, and more than 1/2 people get sick because of drinking unclean water. How water-scarce is Africa? Why do local people rarely dig wells to get water?
In many documentaries, Africa has vast and fertile savannahs, with lush aquatic plants nourishing a variety of animals, and in some places there are vast tropical rainforests, just like an ecological paradise. However, this is only the appearance of Africa, or Africa during the rainy season. In fact, Africa has another completely different face.
Northern Africa has the largest desert in the world, the Sahara Desert. The entire desert occupies 30% of the African continent. How much water is lacking here? The maximum temperature is close to 60°C, and the annual rainfall is only 22 mm, which is equivalent to the rainfall of a heavy rain in China.
The Sahara may be too extreme, but in the sub-Saharan region, the situation is not optimistic. With the exception of Madagascar and a small part of central Africa, which has a tropical rainforest climate, the vast majority of the region has a savanna climate. This climate has one of the biggest characteristics, that is, "droughts die from droughts, and floods die from floods." The annual rainfall is about 700 to 1000 mm, and the rainfall in the rainy season accounts for 80 to 90%. In the dry season, it can last for several months without a drop of rain. It is this climate characteristic that makes the animals living on the grasslands have to travel long distances to migrate every year to find places where water and grass are abundant.
There are nearly 1.3 billion people living on the African continent, and these people are obviously not able to live a migratory life like animals. Not only that, when they choose settlements, they do not choose places close to water sources, which are very dangerous during the rainy season. But for crops, if the distance from the water source is too far, there will be no good harvest, so most of the fields near the water source are the fields of local people, and some large-scale tribes have also emerged. Since the surface water is almost completely dry in the dry season, even some large rivers will be completely cut off, so why don't the locals choose to dig wells?
The premise of drilling a well is to have groundwater. Does the African continent have groundwater? The answer is yes.
In 2012, scientists from the United Kingdom conducted the first meticulous and systematic survey of groundwater content in Africa as a whole, and found that most sub-Saharan sub-Saharan sub-Saharan sub-Saharan sub-Saharan sub-Saharan aquifers are less than 10 meters deep, and only a few areas are deep. There are 20 meters. Not only is the water layer relatively shallow, but the water content is also very large. It is estimated that the African continent holds 100 times more groundwater than surface water. In the arid Sahara Desert, groundwater reserves are equally abundant, reaching 375,000 cubic meters.
So, anywhere in Africa, as long as you are willing to put in the effort, you can definitely drink clean water by digging a well, so why are there so few wells?
The first is the uneven distribution of resources. Despite the large amount of groundwater reserves in Africa, not every place can easily obtain groundwater. Only a few countries in West Africa, such as Senegal, have easy access to groundwater, but many more Africans live below the extreme poverty line set by the United Nations. Most of the areas where these people live are far away from water sources and where groundwater resources are relatively small. In these places, drilling deep wells to extract water requires deep drilling.
The depth of drilling wells is very deep, which means that enough advanced machinery and equipment are needed, and even enough food is a problem in those places. What about these advanced drilling equipment? Therefore, only with the help of UN peacekeepers or foreign aid can water be obtained by drilling wells.
In Tanzania, in the process of drilling wells for the locals by the Chinese peacekeeping force, even if they have enough advanced machinery and equipment, they still have to overcome various difficulties to finally drill a satisfactory well. It can be seen that the backward technology also affects An important factor in the number of local wells. Even if there is a water well, the local people lack the awareness of maintenance, and often a well is abandoned due to lack of maintenance after a long time of use.
Of course, not all parts of Africa are in a situation of water scarcity and no wells. In some countries such as South Africa, groundwater has been over-exploited due to mining. Since 1995, the groundwater level has dropped by more than 20 meters in just 20 years, and the rapid decline of the groundwater level has caused a series of problems such as ground subsidence.
In addition, in some parts of Africa, thousands of years of habit have made local people adapt to the life of carrying water with buckets on their heads. It's just that there are too many people now, and water resources are gradually scarce, so that some countries will fight for precious water resources. Coupled with the long-term colonial rule of Western countries, the local people have lost their desire to explore and are unwilling to spend a lot of money to drill wells. After all, if they are not deep enough, there may not be water.