A vast acquifer could quench the region’s thirst for hundreds of years, but investment is in short supply in this drought-prone nation

When water first flowed from the new community pump in Eenhana this spring, some locals were slow to celebrate. Groundwater has a tainted reputation in this fast-developing, northern Namibian town. Many people in the area still rely on hand-dug wells that double up as watering holes for cattle.

“It was not like those wild west movies, where they strike oil and Stetsons are thrown in the air,” says Martin Quinger, a groundwater hydrologist, “but once the news spread there was a huge amount of excitement that the whole area will flourish and bloom.”

Quinger is leading a project to draw drinking water from Ohangwena II – an ancient aquifer under Namibian and Angolan soil that spans an area roughly 70km by 40km on the Namibian side of the border and is 250m-350m deep.

In 2012, when Quinger and his colleagues from the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) announced their discovery of Ohangwena II, they estimated its stored volume in Namibia at 5bn cubic metres – equivalent to the current demand in the north of the country for 400 years.

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That estimate has quadrupled to 20bn cubic metres, and the BGR team now believe the aquifer will naturally recharge with surface water from southern Angola, provided extraction rates remain tolerably low. With careful husbandry, Ohangwena II could be a permanent drinking water reserve for northern Namibia.

The BGR is working in partnership with the Namibian ministry of agriculture, water and forestry and the water supplier NamWater to establish Ohangwena II as a working resource. The team has drilled three boreholes – costing €700,000 (£627,000) each – to deliver two water supply schemes, the design of which can be copied in other locations as funds for drilling become available.

The scheme in Eenhana delivers 40 cubic metres of water per hour for around 20,000 people, with a potential to increase production to up to 120m³/h. In the Omundaunguilo constituency, further to the north, a proposed wellfield capable of drawing 10 million cubic metres annually could serve rural communities with water so clean that it would fulfil the criteria required of European mineral water.

Quinger says access to water from Ohangwena II has already made a huge difference to people in Eenhana. “The interest of people there in the development is enormous,” he says. “Everybody was asking questions and was so happy the water supply is now on safer ground.

“This whole area is going to develop in the next 20 years – but as I have seen in my time here, when there is a drought, industrialisation stops. Stretching the supply of surface water here is just not possible, so using groundwater from Ohangwena II is the only option to make social and economic development happen.”

These are historically dry times for Namibia, which in 2016 experienced its worst drought in 25 years. Crops failed, a state of emergency was declared, and companies – including Coca-Cola – moved their operations elsewhere.

The incidence of drought in northern Namibia appears to be increasing – but despite Namibians’ demands for water security, the funding for the BGR’s work to tap into Ohangwena II is drying up.

“We are under time constraints,” says Quinger. “This project is going to come to an end in September next year, and before then we were hoping we could at least get a real large-scale extraction scheme on-track – to more or less back-up-supply the whole of central-northern Namibia. We need the initial project funds to do this, and at the moment these are not available.

“Namibia is in financial crisis, and a vicious circle of no funds for investment leading to no development is downgrading the economy.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A settlement on the Namibian border with Angola. Photograph: Graham Prentice/Alamy

Drilling boreholes to tap into Ohangwena II is costly, but Quinger says the BGR’s approach will be cheaper in the long-term than developing an equivalent supply from surface water. Natural hydraulic pressure causes the aquifer’s water to rise to 10m-20m below the surface when a borehole breaches it, which means extraction by pump is energy- and cost-efficient.

As the BGR’s cooperation with the Namibian ministry winds down, work is under way on a sustainability focused infrastructure for future development of Ohangwena II.

“It is Namibia’s first time managing a large-scale groundwater resource like this, and in order to do so you need a lot of products, tools and guidelines to give you the legal and technical basis to do the work,” says Quinger. “So, we have developed a new groundwater database for the whole country, to store monitoring data and observe the quality and quantity of the resource being used.”

Though his team’s involvement in Ohangwena II is set to end next year, Quinger is upbeat about the aquifer’s future as a resource. “We know how to do it, we know it’s sustainable,” he says. “I’m not afraid we’re not on a good track. It’s vital for northern Namibia to be independent in its water supply.”

• This article was amended on 9 August 2017 to correct the estimated stored volume of Ohangwena II in Namibia to 5bn cubic metres.