I want you to imagine this morning that
when you got up your new running water
he went to the tap and there was nothing
no shower that’s not a problem for some
people
hey no toilet could be a problem
for some people but tricky and then what
about life’s real essentials you got up
and there’s no coffee no tea no coffee
man
what a disaster no I want you to imagine
that that happened not just for one day
but for the next day and the next day
and then for a week then for a month
my goodness you’d be getting very smelly
you’d be very decaffeinated so you’d be
a bit bit sleepy life would be pretty
tricky well I would like to share with
you that for two billion people in the
world that is what their daily
experiences they’ve got no running water
in their house and for about half of
them so 1 billion people they don’t even
have safe water close to their houses
they’ve got to walk several kilometers
to find even dirty water from a pond or
a ditch or something along these lines
these people mainly women have to spend
their time collecting water unsafe water
and all the impact that has on their
daily life so not just inconvenient not
having your coffee or your shower but
life changing imagine what these women
mainly in Africa could be doing with
their time if it didn’t have to be going
and spending an hour or 2 hours a day
collecting water and putting on their
heads maybe a 30 kilogram bucket or a
business and walking back to the house
imagine if they didn’t have to do that
every day what could they do with that
time and it’s been lots of research
showing that this waste it’s high in
collecting water impacts women’s
education children’s education it makes
people poorer for longer it impacts also
their health
through waterborne diseases and suchlike
what an impact now in your imagination I
want you to think of these households
across Africa what would it be like if
they had a big reservoir of water of
clean water just maybe 20 meters from
their door wouldn’t that be amazing
would not be life transforming wouldn’t
be fantastic to have that fresh water
just on their doorstep no actually that
is actually the real situation but you
can’t see it it’s not a big tank it’s
not a big reservoir sitting at the edge
of the compound in the middle of the
village it’s beneath their feet 20
meters or so beneath their feet is grain
water an amazing reservoir of water just
beneath our feet out of sight out of
most people’s minds but definitely they
are now that’s good news it’s a good
news for us here today it’s great news
for a lot of people across Africa
particularly who don’t have access to
clean water now what is grain water it’s
because we don’t see it it’s quite hard
for us to imagine what it’s actually a
lake well if you do think about it in
your mind you snow probably what you’re
thinking of is an underground lake you
know something you’re made of going to
see on holiday you could own down a cave
and then you go to a big cavern and
there’s a nice underground lake well
that’s not really what grain waters like
you occasionally get water like that
grain water a night but but for most
people that’s not really how grain water
exists it’s much more complex much more
interesting than a big underground lake
because what it is is that in a tiny
pore spaces and fractures and rocks you
get water so if you imagine some sand or
a sandstone in between the little grains
of sand or spaces maybe about 30% of a
rock like sandstone is actually space
open space
and grain water which starts off as rain
falls on the ground infiltrates through
the soil and gets down into these rocks
to get stored in these rocks so in sand
stones and the little pore spaces
between the sands but even in the hard
fractured rocks like a granite or
something hard like that you can you get
water within the fractures and Granite’s
make weather a little bit with it with
the infiltrating lain arene which might
break it into a more soil and gravel and
you can actually get grain water deep
within these hard rocks as well so this
wonderful is their grain water is
beneath her feet and it’s the geology
that actually determines how much water
is there so understanding what type of
rocks are there can really help us
understand where the best places are to
find this groundwater this great
reservoir of fresh good quality hay
water so some colleagues of mine at the
British Geological Survey we carried out
some an experiment to try and work out
how much water how much grain water
there is across a whole African
continent that we’ve been working there
for four decades with our partners and
universities in Ethiopia Uganda Malawi
Nigeria and we thought well let’s try
working out how much grain water we
think is across the whole continent so
we mapped out the geology from existing
data we split up the geology into
different units according to how much
pore spaces are might be there or how
fractured there might be we gather
together as much data as we could on the
permeability and the porosity and
brought together all these different
different data and after making a few
very plausible assumptions we came up
with a figure and amount of water
available with grain within Africa and
what we found was quite startling
because what we found was that there was
half a million cubic kilometers of grain
water in Africa now that’s a number that
probably doesn’t mean very much to you
it’s a it’s a five with an awful lot of
zeros after it and it’s do I have to
take my word
for it but this amount of water is at a
different scale a different magnitude to
any other fresh water available across
African continent so for example it’s 30
times the amount of water that falls
every year as rain across the whole of
Africa and that’s including the Congo
Basin which is so wet 30 times the
amount of water falling as rain is
stored within the rocks as groundwater
so this really is a reservoir of
completely different magnitude to
anything else that the Africa has no
good news again great news so three
questions kind of come to mind first as
well if it’s there how can we access us
access how can we get at this grain
water second question well it’s a good
quality if it’s been under the ground
for a long time well doesn’t it go off
it does it go wrong and third well there
may be a lot of water there but if we
start using it is it going to run in
well let’s start blending away and then
be worthless in the future so we’ve been
looking at these three questions so the
first one about how do you get the water
right or for thousands of years people
have been drilling wells or digging
wells with their hands getting ten maybe
ten meters 20 meters some examples of
maybe 100 meters digging time to find
water at the water table that’s a great
way of getting at grain water though all
the trouble is whales tend to dry up
during the droughts or during during
just a long dry season they tend to dry
up and you can’t get water out of them
any longer so in about the 1970s and 80s
people started drilling bore holes for
growing water so this is a big drilling
machine and you can drill down maybe 50
meters or a hundred meters to get well
below the water table to to access the
groundwater and across Africa what
people tended to do them hand pumps on
them so you’ve got these drilled bore
holes and you’ve got a hand pump on them
and there you have great access to grain
water now the cost of that is quite high
for an individual to
how salted to drill but with some help
from charities or from the government
drilling a borehole and equipping at the
hand pump has been possible for a lot of
communities unravel revolutionize
communities so it’s great isn’t it
again good news groin waters there and
very slowly people have been getting
access to grain water and if you look at
the sort of global statistics then
people’s access to wales has been going
up quite slowly across africa but it is
going up people are getting access to
grain water but again with our
colleagues and our universities across
africa and also with some NGOs with
water aid we began to think well are
these borehole still working you know
they’ve been put in but actually how
many of them are still functioning
are they still delivering what they
should be doing are they still
delivering great water to people so we
devised a survey and we had very three
simple questions we went out and we
looked at a sample of of poor hosts in
three countries Ethiopia Uganda and
Malawi and we worked Oh first of all is
there any water coming out of a hand
pump at all so go to IO hand pump pump
it’s any water coming out so that’s our
first statistic the second one is we
thought well let’s see when you pump it
is the amount of water coming out that
mayn’t that’s meant to be coming out so
is it delivering what it should be doing
when it was put in and then the third
question was adding in is it reliable is
it working for more than eleven months
of a year and that’s because some
research has shown that if you go back
to who quality water source for maybe a
few weeks or months it can actually
under lie under undermine a lot of the
health benefits we can so these three
questions and we surveyed again across
these three countries a lot of work a
lot of teams involved going to a lot of
villages and getting this information
and what we found were three interesting
numbers the first number is 80 percent
it’s a good number it’s a high number
that was a number of water points that
still had some water coming out of them
so I was good news and these are the
kind of numbers that most of the
government’s report
so they’ll report 80% of the water
supplies are still have water coming on
good news but the second number how many
of them are actually giving the mayn’t
their main to be giving number reduced
to about fifty percent fifty fifty five
percent so just over half of these water
points giving enough water and then when
you added in are they reliable for 11
months a year that dropped right down to
less than 40 percent so here we find
there’s a problem we’ve got this
wonderful resource of groundwater we
have a means of accessing it but
actually a lot of these bore holes are
not delivering what they should be so
why is that is there something
fundamentally wrong with drilling a
borehole and putting a hand pump on it
well we don’t think so and we’re now
taking apart completely dismantling a 50
bore holes in each of these countries to
try and work out more of the detailed
reasons why we are putting them back
together again
thankfully a we find is that some of
these bore holes have maybe been drilled
in the wrong place
somebody’s just drilled it down but it’s
not thought about the geology so if they
thought a little bit more and I’d put it
in the right place that might still be
working also people make a lot of
assumptions that once you drill
something put a hand pump on it that the
local community will be able to manage
that we would define ants their parts
they’ll be able to find people to fix it
they’ll be able to get themselves
together and I think that’s a little bit
unreasonable thinking of how we can get
on with our own neighbors getting on
with your own neighbors and being able
to arrange cooperatively to fix things
it can be quite tricky so we don’t think
there’s anything fundamentally wrong
with a bore holes and hand pumps but
maybe we need to think more about how
they’re first of all sighted and how
they’re managed how they’re managed for
the long term so the second question
then what about quality this grain water
does it go off if it’s taken hundred
years thousand years for the rain to
infiltrate into into the ground
does it go off well we’ve been doing
quite a lot of surveys in different
countries looking at bacterial pathogens
in ingrain water and what we find is
that the whales that people dig by hand
generally full of nasty pathogens that
give waterborne diseases that’s because
it’s happened very shallow water that
can quickly get through the soil and
into the well but the deeper bore holes
that go for a deeper grain water most of
the pathogens have dried off have died
off so actually there’s deeper grain
water stains not to have a lot of e.coli
or bad pathogens in it again good news
and as a grain water infiltrates down it
picks up some of the mineral contents of
the rocks I’m sure that the spring water
and the bottled water that we buy that’s
something to why we buy it because a
good good minerals in it generally
that’s a great great benefit for people
but are some things that picks up
fluoride and arsenic which can have
health are bad impacts on health but if
you understand the geology and if you
test for it you could normally work out
where that’s going to be and try and
avoid you sorts of areas there’s been
some other work we’ve been doing which
has been looking at some emerging
contaminants in grain water in different
African cities and what we find what we
find is that things that people dump on
the surface find their way into grain
water so all those naturally deeper
grain waters go to pathogens in it and
generally it’s got good minerals in it
we can be polluting grain water with
things like I’ve already mentioned that
caffeine you find caffeine in
groundwater pharmaceuticals are probably
one of the most ubiquitous contaminants
is from fertilizers nitrogen getting
into the grain water soaking through the
soil and getting into the groundwater
so grain water generally naturally great
quality but we’ve got a protector
because if we don’t protect it we’re
going to pull it it and then this
wonderful reserve will not be as good as
it should be so this last question then
it’s going to run out well we’ve done
different studies different surveys to
try and work out how sustainable
groundwater is and the best way to do it
is to drill a borehole and put a sensor
in it
which measures how water levels go up
and down they were fortunate in the
youth
and that we’ve got records for hundreds
of years over a hundred years of that so
we can work that out but across Africa
it’s very patchy that sort of data
so we’ve used a different approach we’ve
been looking at satellites and we’ve
been using satellites that measure small
changes in the Earth’s gravity and the
gravity the Earth’s gravity field
changes with with with a mass and the
Earth’s mass is changing all the time
and the reason is changing all the time
is to do with water so as it rains and
as the soils get saturated there’s more
mass and we can measure that from
satellites and there’s some great
scientists at NASA who have used these
data to show that groundwater is
depleting in northern India there’s a
people have looked at in California to
show the groundwater levels decline in
California well we’ve been using it
across Africa it’s got a very big
footprint it doesn’t tell you data about
an individual a farm it’s got a
footprint of about two hundred thousand
kilometers so it’s really at a big scale
and we’ve looked at these data from 2012
as 2002 to 2016 and what we found is
that even with all these bore holes that
have been drilled for a hand pumps it’s
like growing water a grand water is not
declining at all in fact the only
long-term trends we could find were
growing water rising in some areas due
to due to differences in climate and
land use so grain water is not running
out at a moment in Africa with a kind of
exploitation that we’re seeing at the
moment but again we’ve got to be careful
because the amount of water that’s taken
out for irrigation is 10 maybe a hundred
times more than for drinking water
through a hand pump so if lots of
investor’s see parts of Africa as the
out of the movement and move in drill
lots of bore holes and start pumping at
a great rate then the groundwater levels
are going to decline and it will become
unsustainable and people who are relying
on it first from shallow hand pumps and
bore holes it’s not going to be reliable
for them any longer if people are
drilling deeper and pulling out water so
again we’ve got to be careful we’ve got
to try and protect this this great water
source
so I’ve introduced you a little bit to
grain water now I would argue that grain
water is Africa’s greatest natural
resource its oversight it’s generally
out of Maine but it’s a wonderful Gaul
deserve of water and by exploiting grain
water for better livelihoods for better
health then Africa can transform itself
and and for a much more sustainable
future however we’ve got to protect it
we’ve got a protector from contamination
got to think about all the land use and
contamination issues that might happen
and we’ve got to make sure that it’s not
completely over exploited for by one
group for irrigation or for the sort of
economic game a wonderful resource so
when you go home today when you’re
walking along the street I want you to
remember as you’re walking along the
great grain water reservoir
just below your feet 20 metres below a
great thank you [Applause]
when you got up your new running water
he went to the tap and there was nothing
no shower that’s not a problem for some
people
hey no toilet could be a problem
for some people but tricky and then what
about life’s real essentials you got up
and there’s no coffee no tea no coffee
man
what a disaster no I want you to imagine
that that happened not just for one day
but for the next day and the next day
and then for a week then for a month
my goodness you’d be getting very smelly
you’d be very decaffeinated so you’d be
a bit bit sleepy life would be pretty
tricky well I would like to share with
you that for two billion people in the
world that is what their daily
experiences they’ve got no running water
in their house and for about half of
them so 1 billion people they don’t even
have safe water close to their houses
they’ve got to walk several kilometers
to find even dirty water from a pond or
a ditch or something along these lines
these people mainly women have to spend
their time collecting water unsafe water
and all the impact that has on their
daily life so not just inconvenient not
having your coffee or your shower but
life changing imagine what these women
mainly in Africa could be doing with
their time if it didn’t have to be going
and spending an hour or 2 hours a day
collecting water and putting on their
heads maybe a 30 kilogram bucket or a
business and walking back to the house
imagine if they didn’t have to do that
every day what could they do with that
time and it’s been lots of research
showing that this waste it’s high in
collecting water impacts women’s
education children’s education it makes
people poorer for longer it impacts also
their health
through waterborne diseases and suchlike
what an impact now in your imagination I
want you to think of these households
across Africa what would it be like if
they had a big reservoir of water of
clean water just maybe 20 meters from
their door wouldn’t that be amazing
would not be life transforming wouldn’t
be fantastic to have that fresh water
just on their doorstep no actually that
is actually the real situation but you
can’t see it it’s not a big tank it’s
not a big reservoir sitting at the edge
of the compound in the middle of the
village it’s beneath their feet 20
meters or so beneath their feet is grain
water an amazing reservoir of water just
beneath our feet out of sight out of
most people’s minds but definitely they
are now that’s good news it’s a good
news for us here today it’s great news
for a lot of people across Africa
particularly who don’t have access to
clean water now what is grain water it’s
because we don’t see it it’s quite hard
for us to imagine what it’s actually a
lake well if you do think about it in
your mind you snow probably what you’re
thinking of is an underground lake you
know something you’re made of going to
see on holiday you could own down a cave
and then you go to a big cavern and
there’s a nice underground lake well
that’s not really what grain waters like
you occasionally get water like that
grain water a night but but for most
people that’s not really how grain water
exists it’s much more complex much more
interesting than a big underground lake
because what it is is that in a tiny
pore spaces and fractures and rocks you
get water so if you imagine some sand or
a sandstone in between the little grains
of sand or spaces maybe about 30% of a
rock like sandstone is actually space
open space
and grain water which starts off as rain
falls on the ground infiltrates through
the soil and gets down into these rocks
to get stored in these rocks so in sand
stones and the little pore spaces
between the sands but even in the hard
fractured rocks like a granite or
something hard like that you can you get
water within the fractures and Granite’s
make weather a little bit with it with
the infiltrating lain arene which might
break it into a more soil and gravel and
you can actually get grain water deep
within these hard rocks as well so this
wonderful is their grain water is
beneath her feet and it’s the geology
that actually determines how much water
is there so understanding what type of
rocks are there can really help us
understand where the best places are to
find this groundwater this great
reservoir of fresh good quality hay
water so some colleagues of mine at the
British Geological Survey we carried out
some an experiment to try and work out
how much water how much grain water
there is across a whole African
continent that we’ve been working there
for four decades with our partners and
universities in Ethiopia Uganda Malawi
Nigeria and we thought well let’s try
working out how much grain water we
think is across the whole continent so
we mapped out the geology from existing
data we split up the geology into
different units according to how much
pore spaces are might be there or how
fractured there might be we gather
together as much data as we could on the
permeability and the porosity and
brought together all these different
different data and after making a few
very plausible assumptions we came up
with a figure and amount of water
available with grain within Africa and
what we found was quite startling
because what we found was that there was
half a million cubic kilometers of grain
water in Africa now that’s a number that
probably doesn’t mean very much to you
it’s a it’s a five with an awful lot of
zeros after it and it’s do I have to
take my word
for it but this amount of water is at a
different scale a different magnitude to
any other fresh water available across
African continent so for example it’s 30
times the amount of water that falls
every year as rain across the whole of
Africa and that’s including the Congo
Basin which is so wet 30 times the
amount of water falling as rain is
stored within the rocks as groundwater
so this really is a reservoir of
completely different magnitude to
anything else that the Africa has no
good news again great news so three
questions kind of come to mind first as
well if it’s there how can we access us
access how can we get at this grain
water second question well it’s a good
quality if it’s been under the ground
for a long time well doesn’t it go off
it does it go wrong and third well there
may be a lot of water there but if we
start using it is it going to run in
well let’s start blending away and then
be worthless in the future so we’ve been
looking at these three questions so the
first one about how do you get the water
right or for thousands of years people
have been drilling wells or digging
wells with their hands getting ten maybe
ten meters 20 meters some examples of
maybe 100 meters digging time to find
water at the water table that’s a great
way of getting at grain water though all
the trouble is whales tend to dry up
during the droughts or during during
just a long dry season they tend to dry
up and you can’t get water out of them
any longer so in about the 1970s and 80s
people started drilling bore holes for
growing water so this is a big drilling
machine and you can drill down maybe 50
meters or a hundred meters to get well
below the water table to to access the
groundwater and across Africa what
people tended to do them hand pumps on
them so you’ve got these drilled bore
holes and you’ve got a hand pump on them
and there you have great access to grain
water now the cost of that is quite high
for an individual to
how salted to drill but with some help
from charities or from the government
drilling a borehole and equipping at the
hand pump has been possible for a lot of
communities unravel revolutionize
communities so it’s great isn’t it
again good news groin waters there and
very slowly people have been getting
access to grain water and if you look at
the sort of global statistics then
people’s access to wales has been going
up quite slowly across africa but it is
going up people are getting access to
grain water but again with our
colleagues and our universities across
africa and also with some NGOs with
water aid we began to think well are
these borehole still working you know
they’ve been put in but actually how
many of them are still functioning
are they still delivering what they
should be doing are they still
delivering great water to people so we
devised a survey and we had very three
simple questions we went out and we
looked at a sample of of poor hosts in
three countries Ethiopia Uganda and
Malawi and we worked Oh first of all is
there any water coming out of a hand
pump at all so go to IO hand pump pump
it’s any water coming out so that’s our
first statistic the second one is we
thought well let’s see when you pump it
is the amount of water coming out that
mayn’t that’s meant to be coming out so
is it delivering what it should be doing
when it was put in and then the third
question was adding in is it reliable is
it working for more than eleven months
of a year and that’s because some
research has shown that if you go back
to who quality water source for maybe a
few weeks or months it can actually
under lie under undermine a lot of the
health benefits we can so these three
questions and we surveyed again across
these three countries a lot of work a
lot of teams involved going to a lot of
villages and getting this information
and what we found were three interesting
numbers the first number is 80 percent
it’s a good number it’s a high number
that was a number of water points that
still had some water coming out of them
so I was good news and these are the
kind of numbers that most of the
government’s report
so they’ll report 80% of the water
supplies are still have water coming on
good news but the second number how many
of them are actually giving the mayn’t
their main to be giving number reduced
to about fifty percent fifty fifty five
percent so just over half of these water
points giving enough water and then when
you added in are they reliable for 11
months a year that dropped right down to
less than 40 percent so here we find
there’s a problem we’ve got this
wonderful resource of groundwater we
have a means of accessing it but
actually a lot of these bore holes are
not delivering what they should be so
why is that is there something
fundamentally wrong with drilling a
borehole and putting a hand pump on it
well we don’t think so and we’re now
taking apart completely dismantling a 50
bore holes in each of these countries to
try and work out more of the detailed
reasons why we are putting them back
together again
thankfully a we find is that some of
these bore holes have maybe been drilled
in the wrong place
somebody’s just drilled it down but it’s
not thought about the geology so if they
thought a little bit more and I’d put it
in the right place that might still be
working also people make a lot of
assumptions that once you drill
something put a hand pump on it that the
local community will be able to manage
that we would define ants their parts
they’ll be able to find people to fix it
they’ll be able to get themselves
together and I think that’s a little bit
unreasonable thinking of how we can get
on with our own neighbors getting on
with your own neighbors and being able
to arrange cooperatively to fix things
it can be quite tricky so we don’t think
there’s anything fundamentally wrong
with a bore holes and hand pumps but
maybe we need to think more about how
they’re first of all sighted and how
they’re managed how they’re managed for
the long term so the second question
then what about quality this grain water
does it go off if it’s taken hundred
years thousand years for the rain to
infiltrate into into the ground
does it go off well we’ve been doing
quite a lot of surveys in different
countries looking at bacterial pathogens
in ingrain water and what we find is
that the whales that people dig by hand
generally full of nasty pathogens that
give waterborne diseases that’s because
it’s happened very shallow water that
can quickly get through the soil and
into the well but the deeper bore holes
that go for a deeper grain water most of
the pathogens have dried off have died
off so actually there’s deeper grain
water stains not to have a lot of e.coli
or bad pathogens in it again good news
and as a grain water infiltrates down it
picks up some of the mineral contents of
the rocks I’m sure that the spring water
and the bottled water that we buy that’s
something to why we buy it because a
good good minerals in it generally
that’s a great great benefit for people
but are some things that picks up
fluoride and arsenic which can have
health are bad impacts on health but if
you understand the geology and if you
test for it you could normally work out
where that’s going to be and try and
avoid you sorts of areas there’s been
some other work we’ve been doing which
has been looking at some emerging
contaminants in grain water in different
African cities and what we find what we
find is that things that people dump on
the surface find their way into grain
water so all those naturally deeper
grain waters go to pathogens in it and
generally it’s got good minerals in it
we can be polluting grain water with
things like I’ve already mentioned that
caffeine you find caffeine in
groundwater pharmaceuticals are probably
one of the most ubiquitous contaminants
is from fertilizers nitrogen getting
into the grain water soaking through the
soil and getting into the groundwater
so grain water generally naturally great
quality but we’ve got a protector
because if we don’t protect it we’re
going to pull it it and then this
wonderful reserve will not be as good as
it should be so this last question then
it’s going to run out well we’ve done
different studies different surveys to
try and work out how sustainable
groundwater is and the best way to do it
is to drill a borehole and put a sensor
in it
which measures how water levels go up
and down they were fortunate in the
youth
and that we’ve got records for hundreds
of years over a hundred years of that so
we can work that out but across Africa
it’s very patchy that sort of data
so we’ve used a different approach we’ve
been looking at satellites and we’ve
been using satellites that measure small
changes in the Earth’s gravity and the
gravity the Earth’s gravity field
changes with with with a mass and the
Earth’s mass is changing all the time
and the reason is changing all the time
is to do with water so as it rains and
as the soils get saturated there’s more
mass and we can measure that from
satellites and there’s some great
scientists at NASA who have used these
data to show that groundwater is
depleting in northern India there’s a
people have looked at in California to
show the groundwater levels decline in
California well we’ve been using it
across Africa it’s got a very big
footprint it doesn’t tell you data about
an individual a farm it’s got a
footprint of about two hundred thousand
kilometers so it’s really at a big scale
and we’ve looked at these data from 2012
as 2002 to 2016 and what we found is
that even with all these bore holes that
have been drilled for a hand pumps it’s
like growing water a grand water is not
declining at all in fact the only
long-term trends we could find were
growing water rising in some areas due
to due to differences in climate and
land use so grain water is not running
out at a moment in Africa with a kind of
exploitation that we’re seeing at the
moment but again we’ve got to be careful
because the amount of water that’s taken
out for irrigation is 10 maybe a hundred
times more than for drinking water
through a hand pump so if lots of
investor’s see parts of Africa as the
out of the movement and move in drill
lots of bore holes and start pumping at
a great rate then the groundwater levels
are going to decline and it will become
unsustainable and people who are relying
on it first from shallow hand pumps and
bore holes it’s not going to be reliable
for them any longer if people are
drilling deeper and pulling out water so
again we’ve got to be careful we’ve got
to try and protect this this great water
source
so I’ve introduced you a little bit to
grain water now I would argue that grain
water is Africa’s greatest natural
resource its oversight it’s generally
out of Maine but it’s a wonderful Gaul
deserve of water and by exploiting grain
water for better livelihoods for better
health then Africa can transform itself
and and for a much more sustainable
future however we’ve got to protect it
we’ve got a protector from contamination
got to think about all the land use and
contamination issues that might happen
and we’ve got to make sure that it’s not
completely over exploited for by one
group for irrigation or for the sort of
economic game a wonderful resource so
when you go home today when you’re
walking along the street I want you to
remember as you’re walking along the
great grain water reservoir
just below your feet 20 metres below a
great thank you [Applause]
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