For at least five years, villagers from the dusty settlement of Griftu in Wajir County in semi-arid north-eastern Kenya had to trek 2 km every day in blazing 40°C heat to fetch freshwater for their daily needs. The water supply had dried up, unable to keep up with the growing population in the area.

‘The old system broke down. The population grew, and demand rose sharply over a short period of time. Too many people, not enough water. Mothers and children spent hours looking for and fetching it, leaving no time for anything else,’ said Griftu resident Chief Mohamed Noor Hassan.

Thanks to the More Water, More Life initiative, a partnership between local and national authorities, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Resilience Hub for Africa and Unicef, water is again flowing in Griftu, bringing relief to 9 200 people and nearly 5 000 livestock.

In July 2025, the project sank a 454m-deep borehole to reach an aquifer that had been pinpointed by the UNDP and Unicef as a reliable groundwater resource. The UN agencies have been using an innovative groundwater mapping solution that integrates satellite data, digital mapping, local knowledge and on-the-ground verification to create detailed aquifer maps in water-starved parts of the continent. They say the mapping solution increases the success of drilling for groundwater from 50% to 90%, and Unicef says it and its partners are now exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve data analysis.

As of 2024, 39 successful wells had been drilled in Ethiopia and Kenya, with the project expected to expand to Djibouti. The project’s groundwater suitability maps now cover 1 million km² and 10 million people in need.

Griftu is but one instance of a much larger and growing problem in Africa.

Citing UN research, David Michel, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, spelled out the situation in a 2025 online opinion piece. ‘Some 869 million people, more than the total populations of the United States and European Union combined, lack safely managed drinking water. Since 2015, the share of inhabitants using safely managed drinking water services has barely crept upwards from 27 to just 31%, even as sub-Saharan Africa’s population climbed by almost 20% during the same period.’

A December 2025 report from the Digital Innovations for Water Secure Africa (Diwasa) initiative echoes Michel’s concern, adding that the growing demand on Africa’s water resources is exacerbated by climate variability and deteriorating water quality. The report, titled Digital Solutions for Africa’s Water Management, adds that ‘the lack of data on water availability and scarcity hinders effective planning and decision-making to address these challenges’.

Launched in 2020 by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) with support from Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) and the Helmsley Charitable Trust, Diwasa uses technology such as Earth observation, hydrological modelling, AI and advanced data analytics to generate data about the continent’s surface water resources. Incorporating stakeholder engagement and training, Diwasa builds user-centric digital solutions for more effective and sustainable water management in Africa.

Accessed through the IWMI GeoPortal, the available data ranges from monthly discharge statistics for more than 650 000 stream segments between 2001–2021 to a breakdown of agricultural water use.

While most large-scale agricultural water-use data for the continent is available at a coarse resolution – which restricts accurate monitoring and analysis – Diwasa provides data on crop-water use estimates for irrigated and rainfed crops across the entire continent, available at 1 km spatial resolution spanning different time scales, from 2001 to 2021. For large parts of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Zambia, the data picture is even clearer, provided at a 30m spatial resolution.

In collaboration with national authorities, Diwasa has developed a suite of five field-scale water-management and -monitoring tools tailored for on-the-ground realities.

Its Access to Water tool (Acwa) is a high-resolution geospatial platform that maps water access across Africa to support strategic planning, humanitarian response and equitable water service delivery. It categorises access levels and incorporates climate-driven water risks such as drought and flooding.

Its Climate Data Engine for Agricultural Resilience tool, meanwhile, enables users to select and analyse climate projection data under different scenarios and visualise the impacts of climate change on water availability for agriculture.

In Southern Africa, the IWMI, working with the Limpopo Watercourse Commission, has developed a digital twin of the Limpopo River Basin, a 400 000 km² area that serves five countries – Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

‘As a virtual platform, it provides a comprehensive, real-time view of the basin and integrates national datasets, satellite imagery, remote sensing, citizen science data and modelling,’ according to the Diwasa report. ‘Through an online portal, decision-makers can visualise flows, reservoir levels, water quality and irrigation use, enabling proactive responses to droughts, floods and water allocation pressures.’ The digital twin also includes an AI assistant that delivers rapid, science-based insights, maps and scenario analyses.

The virtual representation of the entire river basin now allows more accurate decision-making on water use, enabling water managers to visualise real-time data and to model data and watershed processes for forecasting on water availability and quality. The IWMI explains that uneven water monitoring capacity in the five countries in the basin had in the past made it difficult to create an accurate hydrological model of the region.

‘New sources of data developed from a mixture of satellite images and machine learning go a long way to filling gaps in monitoring capacity,’ it says.

The surface water datasets are derived from Landsat satellite images and are made available for free by DE Africa on a cloud platform.

‘This innovation shows how open access data can catalyse real-world impact, creating a way to track water availability in remote areas with minimal need for investment in data gathering, processing and field monitoring. With this data, the researchers could focus on developing methodologies that are now easily available for other users such as government water authorities, researchers and NGOs to adapt to more reservoirs and dams,’ according to the IWMI.

In north-eastern South Africa, a non-profit called Kruger to Canyons (K2C) has used geographic information systems (GIS) technology to map catchment areas in the 2.5 million ha Kruger to Canyons biosphere, which it monitors.

The biosphere is home to a number of important river catchments, the upper reaches of which receive very high rainfall ranging from 1 000–2 000 mm per year and form a substantial part of two major Strategic Water Source Areas for surface and groundwater in South Africa.

The maps serve as ‘a compelling visual aid for K2C to build consensus among the region’s residents and businesses about the importance of resource management, sustainable practices and disaster risk reduction’, according to David Gadsden, director of conservation solutions at the Environmental Systems Research Institute, which provides GIS technology to non-profits around the world and manages the IWMI GeoPortal.

K2C programme manager Nick Theron had a more succinct way of explaining it. ‘A map always tells an amazing story. If you’re sitting together with a group of people and you need to explain what’s going on or get everyone onto the same page – or better understand our work and strategically how we plan – then we need maps.’

And without maps, people living in places such as Griftu in Kenya would still be walking two kilometres in blazing heat every day to fetch their water.

‘Water that is near to us changes everything,’ said Hassan. ‘It’s not just for drinking, it’s for cooking, washing, feeding animals. It gives people time to work, to rest, to live.’

Image: Unsplash