University of the Western Cape’s Water Project Prepares Limpopo Learners to Monitor Own River Water Quality
Professor Jacqueline Goldin, Extraordinary Associate Professor of Anthropology and Water Sciences at UWC, said data collected on river water quality is shared with an international programme, and plans are for the project to expand to other provinces.
More than 200 schoolchildren in Limpopo have been trained to capture precious data about water quality from boreholes and rivers near their schools for a project linked to the United Nations and run by UWC.
The project links academics, citizen scientists and learners to monitor borehole and river water.
“People who are on the ground are extremely knowledgeable, and we just need to tap into that. I think citizen science is a brilliant way of doing that,” Prof Goldin told the GroundUp news agency.
Children from Mara Primary School participating in the
Diamonds on the Soles of Our Feet programme. Prof Goldin
is pictured far right. Picture: Ashraf Hendricks, GroundUp
In 2021 Prof Goldin and her team started to work on a Water Research Commission (WRC) project which was selected by Falling Walls as a winner from 189 projects from around the world. It involves farmers helping to collect data to answer questions about underground water in two Limpopo villages – Ga-Komape and Ga-Manamela.
“The most important aspect of the project is that it is taking science from the laboratory into the field, transforming and empowering communities,” she noted.
Most of the farmers – miles away from anywhere – in this potato-growing area, use groundwater which they pump from their wells. These are quiet and remote areas, and because roads are bad, it makes the area extremely difficult to access, with vast distances from one village to the next.
With this ongoing project Prof Goldin and her team are now not only establishing how much water is in the wells and how to transmit this information to government, researchers and planners, but also water quality in boreholes, rivers and streams.