Water access remains a challenge in rural areas of low-income countries. Manual drilling technologies have the potential to enhance water access by providing a low cost drinking water alternative for communities in low and middle income countries. This paper provides an overview of the main successes and challenges experienced by manual boreholes in the last two decades. A review of the existing methods is provided, discussing their advantages and disadvantages and comparing their potential against alternatives such as excavated wells and mechanized boreholes. Manual boreholes are found to be a competitive solution in relatively soft rocks, such as unconsolidated sediments and weathered materials, as well as and in hydrogeological settings characterized by moderately shallow water tables. Ensuring professional workmanship, the development of regulatory frameworks, protection against groundwater pollution and standards for quality assurance rank among the main challenges for the future.

While access to water remains an issue in arid and semiarid regions across the world, aquifers have the potential to help millions of people out of poverty by providing a reliable source of drinking and irrigation water. Manual boreholes are increasingly advocated as a safe and cost-effective substitute to mechanized drilling, as well as to traditional excavation methods. This research banks on the assumption that field and remote sensing data can be integrated within a geospatial database in order to map the viability of manual boreholes based on factors such as rock type, water table depth, landforms, or water quality. The approach presents three main novelties in relation to methodological precedents: (1) outcomes are not only expressed in terms of technical feasibility, but also as a function of drilling time and cost; (2) maps refer to a specific drilling technique; and (3) results take into account borehole diameter, as this constrains both drilling time and cost. The method provides univocal outcomes that can be immediately useful for non-experts, donors, planners, or practitioners and that can be readily exported to other catchment-scale settings. Results were validated against geophysical data.

Granting safe water access worldwide is a major objective of the Sustainable Development Goals. Water access is a manifold concept that encompasses collection time, distance from the household, water quality, affordability, and reliability of water sources, among other factors. GIS-based methods can be particularly useful in improving water access estimates, particularly in rural areas of developing countries. Based on an extensive water point database (n = 770), this paper explores the main challenges involved in mapping water access in two rural communes of Burkina Faso. Water access is estimated in terms of coverage per surface area. Coverage is filtered into four distinct categories of improved water sources, namely existing infrastructures, operational infrastructures, permanent infrastructures, and permanent infrastructures that provide safe water. The outcomes suggest that the study area is better endowed with water access than rural Burkina Faso and the remainder of the African continent, although there are important questions regarding groundwater quality. The outcomes highlight the conceptual differences between coverage and access, as well as some of the practical difficulties involved in estimating water access beyond standard ratios. The shortcomings include the absence of continuous monitoring of infrastructure functionality and water quality, as well as water affordability, among others. Enhancing national borehole databases with items aligned with the United Nations’ definition of water access is recommended.