 Well hello everyone, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2015 webinar series. Today's webinar will focus on manual drilling and provide you with a global perspective of local realities. We developed a webinar in collaboration with Dr. Kirsten Danert of the Rural Water Supply Network. My name is Yana Aranda and I'll be one of the moderators for today's webinar along with Susan Davis of Improve International. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for a Senior Program Manager. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, manual drilling, a global perspective of local realities. Manual drilling techniques have been used to develop drinking water supplies in at least 36 countries around the world. In some places manual drilling technologies are well established, while in others the introduction is more recent. Recent estimates suggest that the number of people in Africa relying on groundwater via borehole with a hand pump or on hand dug wells has doubled from 75 to 150 million in the past 10 years. In today's webinar, we will examine some of the main concerns about the spread of manual drilling, drawing particularly a message from Nigeria and Chad. To do so, we have invited a leading expert in this field, Dr. Kirsten Danert of the Rural Water Supply Network. She is joined by another water specialist, Susan Davis of Improve International to help us navigate the conversation. Welcome to you both and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series generally. Along with myself, we have Michael Mater of ASME, Holly Schneider-Brown, Jackie Halliday and Steve Welch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide. Webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenter, we thought it would be a great idea to remind you about E4C and who we are. E4C is a global community of nearly 900,000 people around the world, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs and social scientists working to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities worldwide, including access to potable water and electricity, effective health care, improved agriculture and sanitation, just a name of few. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and information from all the members of our coalition, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all around the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This is a free, publicly available series of online seminars showcasing the best practices of thinking of leaders in the field. Information on upcoming installments in this series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on our webinar's page. And you see the URL listed over here. Additionally, all recorded webinars are on our YouTube channel. The URL is listed here as well. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, E4C webinars. Our next webinar will be on June 24 at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. And our topic will be development work in developed countries. Turning the lens on our home countries. Check out the E4C webinars page for updates on our speakers and registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation directly for the webinar. All right, so a few housekeeping items before we get started. First and foremost, we'd love to see where everyone is from today. In the chat window, which is located to the bottom right of your screen, please type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, you can access it by clicking the chat icon on the top right corner of your screen. I'll go ahead and get us started. I see folks from New Jersey. There we go. I'm here from New York, New York. I see Toronto, Minnesota. More folks from New Jersey and Chicago. Very cool. Philadelphia. Lots of Jersey representation. Now we have the UK and India. Very cool. Thank you for joining us today. It's great to have all of you on board. So any technical questions or administrative problems should be typed into that chat window. And also feel free to send a private chat to Holly or Jackie if you have any issues. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks that you may want to share with the other attendees. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, which is located right below the chat, to type in your questions for the presenter directly. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. If that does not work, you can use the caller number for the teleconference. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour for PDH, for this session, please follow the instructions on the top of our webinar's webpage, the URL listed over here. So with that and, of course, seeing more folks from all over the world on our chat here, I'd like to introduce to you all our webinar moderator for today, Susan Davis. She is the Executive Director of Improved International and has 23 years of leadership roles in both the for-profit and nonprofit world. She served on the boards of the Millennium Water Alliance and the WASH Advocacy Initiative and has evaluated international development projects in 18 countries and managed a $1 million WASH project in China. She was on the senior management team at Water for People and began her work in international development with Water Partners International, which is now Water.org. Many of you are likely familiar with that group. And has also worked with CareUSA. She also happens to be a previous webinar presenter for you for C and we're thrilled to have her lead the discussion with our presenter. Susan, I'll turn it over to you to introduce our speaker. Susan, I think you're on mute. Perhaps you can unmute. There we go. Sorry about that. No worries. Hello, everybody. I'm pleased to present today's presenter, who is Dr. Kirsten Danert. She is a rural water supply specialist who has spent 16 years developing in-country capacity for operation and maintenance, cost-effective borehole drilling, technology adoption, and sector performance monitoring. She's provided face-to-face advisory and capacity development services to national and local governments, NGOs, and the private sector in over 10 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as remote support for others. She lived and worked in Uganda for 10 years up to 2008 when she moved to Switzerland to join SCAT. Since 2009, she has led the Secretariat of the Rural Water Supply Network, RWSN. Kirsten, we look forward to your presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Good morning to you, and good afternoon to some of you. Today, I'm going to be presenting on manual drilling, giving you a bit of a global perspective of local reality. The photograph that you can see on the slide is the manual drilling compendium that we published a few months ago, and I'm going to basically talk about what we found in preparing this compendium. In a sense, I'm going to explain a little bit how we prepared the compendium, a little bit about what manual drilling is, and why it's so interesting for drinking and domestic water supplies. We're going to look at the extent of manual drilling, illustrated by some statistics and some stories, and then I'm going to reflect on some of the concerns. We'll be concluding with the need to balance potential with concerns. I'd just like to say that this presentation was supposed to be done jointly with my colleague Jose Resti Canuto from UNICEF, but unfortunately, at the last minute, he couldn't make it, so I'm presenting for both of us today. So before I move on any further, let me just clarify what manual drilling is. Essentially, it's the use of human energy to drill a hole. Drilling requires penetration of information, removal of the spoil, and supporting the hole from collapsing. The two photographs on the right are examples of drill bits used on jetting equipment in Nigeria. Manual drilling is highly applicable in unconsolidated materials, such as sands, filts, and clays, and some methods can work in stiff clays, laterite, and sandstone, to some extent. Manual drilling is normally used to drill to a depth of about 40 metres. There are basically four methods for drilling. Moving around the illustrations of the photographs, there's augurring and bailing, jetting, which is also known as hand turning, sludging, and percussion and bailing. Both jetting and sludging on the right use considerable volumes of water. Now, if you want to know more about the methods, please have a look at the explanations and the links and the compendium itself. Some of these four methods can actually be combined in the field, and in fact, there are now some so-called brands of equipment with particular specifications, like the Vonderig for hand augurring. And some organisations have developed manual drilling kits, which combine two or more methods. The table on the left provides an overview of some of the kits, at least the kits that we know about. And on the right, you see pictures of a particular drilling kit that's been introduced by Willamette International in Sierra Leone. And I understand this is basically the kit produced by WaterFor. So why is manual drilling so interesting? Well, firstly, the cost of manual drilling can be 10 to 25% of the cost of machine-drilled wells. And such low costs mean that some people can even afford to pay for their own water supplies, what we call self-supply. Secondly, manual drilling equipment is light and transportable. It can reach places where conventional equipment can't reach. And Walter McGuina's quote is a case in point in the slide. In the pictures at the bottom of the slide are examples of manual drilling in remote, difficult to access places in Ghana, Togo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. There's also a case of manual drilling being used on islands where really it's very difficult to get conventional heavy equipment to. Thirdly, local employment of income generation from boho construction contribute to the local economy. Manual drilling creates jobs and water for the household or the farm, and that water is often used for productive purposes as well. And finally, manual drilling can construct shallow wells faster than digging a hand dug well. And you could imagine that if you think of the diameter of a hand dug well, which is at least a meter, compared to what you're doing with hand drilling. And also safety-wise, manual drilling doesn't require laborers to work underground. This is a slide that's to show you a bit of where this compendium has come from. Essentially, in some parts of Asia, manual drilling has been around for generations. In contrast, in several African countries, manual drilling, particularly for drinking water, is a much more recent phenomenon. Efforts to introduce manual drilling with an African date back to the 1960s with a boost in the 1980s, and again, over the last 10 years or so. There have been numerous initiatives, some of which have been more successful or long-term than others. Manual drillers, such as Obed Muto from Chad in the photographs, are really at the heart of manual drilling, and I'll come back to that. Promotion of manual drilling is being undertaken by drillers themselves and also by several organizations, both large and small international organizations. Personally, I've been involved with manual drilling since 1998, and I was after the subject of my PhD thesis. We failed to bring about the widespread uptake of new manual drilling technology in Uganda, but that's another story. On this slide, you see a small sample of the growing number of reports, studies, and synthesis documents, as well as the UNICEF-supported toolkit on manual drilling. The compendium is the latest of these publications. The development of the compendium was supported by UNICEF and undertaken with SCAT Foundation under the umbrella of the Rural Water Supply Network. The Swiss Agency for Development and Corporation are supporting the determination through RWSN, the network. It actually took two years to pull the compendium together, and it draws from interviews, presentations, discussions in webinars, literature, field documentation. Many individuals were also involved in the review process, and I'm very grateful to those of you, some of you who I see are online, but contributed to the compendium and also encouraged me through the process. So where does manual drilling take place? Well, we've been able to document experiences from 36 countries, and you can see from the map that we've categorized these countries into four types. The dark blue shows where manual drilling for drinking water is well-established, and that includes Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Madagascar, Bolivia, Niger, and Nigeria. The countries in red are where manual drilling has been fairly recently introduced, and the light blue countries, such as Chad, are somewhere in between those extremes. Manual drilling is taking off. Later on, I'm going to talk about these different stages, but you can see there are also countries in yellow, and that's countries where manual drilling was undertaken in the past, that includes Zimbabwe and South Sudan, and in Uganda, manual drilling was particularly used in the early 1990s, it then stopped, and new techniques have been more recently introduced and look promising. The growth in tube wells and tube well use in India over the last 30 years has been phenomenal, and you can see that on the graph, and that's data of tube well use for drinking water, and manually drilled wells account for a considerable part of this growth, and that's particularly in the sediments of the Indo-Gongetic plains in the north. In Bangladesh, on the right, most people have been drilling manually, most of the tube well story have been drilled manually, and provide drinking water for about 130 million people. In this particular photograph, you can see two drillers up on scaffolding, and in Bangladesh, we've got reports of manual drilling that's going down as far as 250 meters. That's very, very deep, that's unusually deep. The next slide gives you a flavor of the spread of manual drilling in Nigeria. In the 1980s, jetting, and you saw that on the earlier slide, jetting was introduced into an agricultural program in the north, you see the states in the north. And in the south, the technique actually spilled over into drinking water from survey work that was done in the oil industry. And in both parts of the country, the technique has spilled over to provide drinking water supplies into other states. Most of the wells drilled are paid by users themselves, in other words, self-supply, but in Nigeria, government also contracts manual drillers for its water supplies where appropriate. So I'm just going to go to the next slide so you can see here the spread of manual drilling within the country. In fact, the scale and spread of manual drilling in Nigeria is absolutely staggering. And as you can see from this slide, there's been a tremendous growth of a number of people using groundwater for their drinking water in Nigeria. From 30 million in 1990 to 106 million today. And manual drilling is part of that story. Another part of the story is the decline of the numbers of people and in the proportion of the population that rely on pipe water supplies. But that's another part of Nigeria's story. This is the last example I'm going to show you about the spread of drilling, but this is Obed Mutu, who I showed you earlier on. He was one of the first drillers to bring jetting into Chad from Nigeria. In fact, he learned about jetting in the agricultural program that I showed you in the first Nigeria slide. And jetting is much quicker than sludging. Sludging was what was used before in Chad. And according to some of the drillers that I interviewed recently, it was the introduction of jetting that really fueled the expansion of manual drilling within Chad. On the right, we see three drillers from Chad. And in fact, Chadian drillers are exporting their skills and know-how to other countries. UNICEF organized the first South-South exchange to the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the drillers themselves have extended on into other countries. I'm excited some of the other initiatives to introduce manual drilling. And these have basically been undertaken or supported by US and European-based NGOs and consultants. You can once again see the number of countries that are colored in red. And they are not few countries. So it all sounds fantastic. And yes, the use and spread of manual drilling for domestic water supplies will continue. Manual drilling is here to stay. However, concerns have been raised about water quality, particularly of wells installed in urban and peri-urban areas. Unfortunately, there's been relatively little work to validate and coordinate various small studies that have been done on water quality. There was a recent study done by the World Bank of water quality in Potacourt, Nigeria, which has many hand-drilled wells. And it's found that 70% of the borehole samples did not show any detectable fecal coliform contamination. From our observations and discussions, it's clear that technical standards for drilling and completion are not always adhered to. In cases where they have been published, they may not even be widely known about. However, some authorities, notably in parts of India, are trying very hard to ensure that technical standards are upheld for public supplies. Finally, there are concerns about the long-term viability and quality of water resources. This may not be an issue for isolated hand pumps in rural areas. However, water resources must be properly considered in denser populated areas or places where large volumes are being extracted. Don't worry, I'm not going to read this slide. It's just to highlight that there are a number of technical issues that must be considered when drilling and completing a borehole. And these are not always taken into consideration. My personal passion is the sanitary seal to prevent surface contamination, but all of these aspects are extremely important. So, concluding the first part of the presentation, there's really need to balance the enormous potential of manual drilling with the concerns. On the left, there's a woman using the very new foot pump installed on a manually drilled well in Chad. And on the right are children walking home to a rapidly urbanizing area on the edge of Lagos, Nigeria. Here it's the norm to construct a manually drilled well at people's homes. And you can see the new homes coming up in the area. These two quotes really speak for themselves, so let me just pause as you read. See in the previous presentation, some of the history of manual drilling, why it's interesting, and some of the techniques. And we recognize there's a need to balance the potential with the concerns. A way to start balancing these things is to support and aim for a professional manual drilling sector. You see first a definition of professionalization, and that's how we defined it in the context of the RWCEN strategy. We'll then see the spread of manual drilling. It's spreading from countries where it was recently introduced to those that it's well established. And then we're gonna review a little bit of the most important considerations that we need to think about in supporting professionalization. In the context of the Rural Water Supply Network strategy, we define professionalism as the skills, good judgment, and behavior that expect is from a person or an organization to undertake a job well. And if we agree that key stakeholders in the context of a professional manual drilling sector are governments, local entrepreneurs, and consumers, all of us supporting the sector should identify and understand how to best raise the professionalism of all of them. We know that as a result of the professionalization of sector countries in Africa, such as in Senegal, Chad, and Niger, there have been dramatic reductions in the cost of water points coupled with significant gains towards national water supply targets. Here is a figure of an analysis which is part of the compendium. And this refers back to the map I presented earlier with the different colors. And the diffusion of innovation is a discipline that really looks at how new ideas or technologies are taken up and how they spread. And I think as we think about manual drilling, it's useful to think about these different stages. For all innovations, whether bronze age tools, paper, mobile phones, they take time to be taken up to a large scale and some fail. And the time taking varies from years to decades and even centuries. But there is consensus that a technology uptake passes through more or less three stages. The first is the invention or the introduction and that's when a technology is developed and tested or introduced into a new context. At this stage, the uptake is quite low. Take-off, or the tipping point, is where there's a sharp increase in the number of people adopted in the technology, often copying from others. An established technology is where it's common, generally accepted and widely used. The take-off stage is also referred to as the Valley of Death as a transition from testing and introduction of a technology to its widespread use is very difficult. And within the context of products for the poor, this stage often tends to be very under resourced. Most of the countries which were documented in the compendium are actually in the first phase. In all of these, there are no more than 1,000 and usually much less wealth that have been manually drilled. And I mentioned earlier about Chad and Senegal Zambia, they're in this kind of second phase. Now, based on the experiences documented in lessons learned, we think that understanding these three stages helped those of us who are promoting manual drilling and who are trying to professionalise the sector. Basically, in the early years of introduction, influential leaders may need to be convinced that manual drilling is actually a viable technology. And the comment here from Ashley, that's one of the problems that has held back uptake of technology. Also in the early years, even selecting suitable sites can be quite challenging and there may be difficulties in obtaining the necessary equipment and the materials. At the second stage at which the technology takes off, demand can actually overtake supply. And the entrepreneurs with little technical experience normally jump onto the market to try and make money. This can lead to poor quality and that can damage the reputation of the technology. In this case, manual drilling. Alternatively, the trained and equipped drillers are just not able to generate enough work. They lose motivation and they end up switching to other activities. Therefore, support to build a capacity of enterprises on things like marketing, business development, finance, record keeping and ethics are very, very important. At this point in time, the formation and nurturing of associations to self-regulate is also very important. Finally, at the stage where technology becomes established, quality assurance. It can continue to be a problem. Problems of over extraction of groundwater may also emerge depending on the level of extraction and rates of recharge. Training and support to drillers and associations are very important here. And groundwater resort is monitoring as well as regulation of extraction is recommended. In one of the earlier slides, I mentioned the toolkit for the professionalization of manual drilling in Africa that UNICEF prepared in collaboration with Practica Foundation and Enterprise Works Vita. That was back in 2010. And this toolkit outlines five main steps for the professionalization of manual drilling. One is the Rural Water Supply Assessment, including identification of favorable conditions for drilling, looking at market conditions and enterprises. Second stage is selection of drilling enterprises, including mechanical well drillers perhaps who are interested to expand into manual drilling and that may not sound logical, but I've certainly met quite a few mechanical drillers who've moved into manual drilling. Also training the enterprises on issues around well drilling, hydrogeology, supervision and also business management, as I explained earlier. It's also important to train the supporting organizations and agencies, such as quality control firms, supervisors, tool makers, even mobilizers to train the community, pump installers, and that's about a key part of supporting business development. And then of course, ideally, it's a process to actually certify drilling enterprises at the national and more local level so that when individuals or companies or NGOs ask for drillers to do work, they can really see that these are certified enterprises. That's proving to be quite just cool. Anyway, it's explained on the toolkit that depending on the existing capacity, it takes at least three to five years, I would say much longer, to develop a professional manual drilling sector that will be able to respond effectively to tenders and to requests from the population more generally. As part of the effort to document manual drilling experiences, there were some country of missions undertaken last year and the year before. And from a mission in Chad, some really important reflections came out about the process to achieve a professional sector. And I'm gonna share these specific reflections with you. So in Chad, the sediments cover about half the country, which is home to more than half the population. And the potential for manual drilling to improve drinking water is massive on large areas within these sediments, depending on the groundwater level, of course. Chad's manual drilling is growing rapidly with individuals investing in their own drilled wells. And anything between 3,000 and 10,000 manually drilled boreholes have been constructed in the capital in Jamina alone. Numbers are very difficult to get. Manual drilling is not just confined to Chad's capital, though, but it's used in some rural areas as well, funded by projects as well as householders themselves. The national government, together with UNICEF, have made a significant contribution to the professionalization of manual drilling in Chad, thanks to their support and training of private enterprises. Going back to 2009, a total of 43 enterprises were trained back then, and others have been trained in the future. They were also encouraged to register as legal entities. And in fact, when I was in Chad, I met companies. I really don't think they would have registered had it not been for that push and training the UNICEF and Chadian government. The rise in the demand for manually drilled wells, as well as the supply of drilled wells, has led to more competition. That has pushed prices down, but there are concerns that construction quality has also suffered. Drilling standards have been set, but they're not always adhered to, and they're not known by all the potential clients. There's limited regulation of manual drilling in Chad, work funded by government, and some NGOs. They ensure that the enterprises are actually registered for the Chamber of Commerce, but of course, who checks registration when you're asking for private work for your own home? And there's also a national drilling association, but it's still got to find its way and play its role in the sector. So I'll be very happy to know I'm coming too, slowly into an end. The energy and drive of enterprises themselves with these steps that I talked about in the previous slide can really support the development of a vibrant and growing drilling industry, as we see in Chad and other countries. And this should give courage to agencies in other countries who would like to bring about similar change of manual drilling. However, support to the professionalization is not a one-off short-term intervention. There's need for medium to long-term engagement, including regular dialogue between the private sector, the government, and other stakeholders, particularly as the number of enterprises starts to grow and a new drillers association, if it's been set up, tries to establish self and find its niche. Governments might lead in issues around regulation, monitoring of water quality, access to technical advice and credit to water users and local businesses, as well as raising public awareness. And I think that's a key issue, public awareness raising. South South collaboration, and we saw that with Chad going to the Democratic Republic of Congo exchange, there's really proven key to manual drilling uptake and extension. And this can be a very good entry point to start to strengthen the uptake of manual drilling in a particular country or a particular region of a country. There are many challenges to professionalization. And in fact, some of these challenges are exactly the same for manual drilling and mechanized drilling. We also have issues around quality with mechanized drilling in many countries. Unfortunately, some promoters and local enterprises are learning about manual drilling without a basic understanding of good drilling practices in general. So the manual drilling profession should not be considered in isolation from the machine drilling profession, particularly when it comes to standards, practices, regulation and association. So manual drilling offers an incredible opportunity in the light of the sustainable development goal agenda of getting everybody with access to a safe, reliable water supply. But it also offers tremendous benefits for local employment. But the real question is how to set and uphold adequate minimum standards for the industry, as well as those that are promoting it. There really is need to raise professionalism. The use of manual drilling toolkit on the left provides guidance on this capacity building of private enterprises. However, the guidance on the roles and responsibilities of local national government is a little bit weak. Within the toolkit, really, there's limited and unproven evidence around how to guide these regulatory mechanisms. On the right, there's another document which, and this sets out principles to be adhered to for drilling generally. It's the code of practice for cost-effective boreholes or water wells, as you call it in America. But unlike the toolkit, it doesn't set out a step-by-step process of how to get stakeholders to a more professional sector. So each of these two publications have things that you could learn from each other. We, and I'm talking about RWFN, particularly our partnership with SCAT, with UNICEF, and Watering. We believe that manual drilling profession should not be considered an isolation of machine drilling, particularly when it comes to standards, practices, regulations, and associations. In order to harness the incredible opportunity for manual drilling, there's need for governments, private enterprises, water users, and promoters to jointly strive towards more professionalism. This means adapting and applying the guidance provided by the toolkit, as well as the principles in the code of practice and the supporting material. So our efforts in the coming two years are directed on having this marriage, I think that's how I can call it a marriage. Our next steps include working with stakeholders to identify areas of concern and opportunities to further professionalise mechanised and manual drilling in Africa. Over the next two years, and we've already started with producing films, developing guidance materials, and providing technical support to help stakeholders to get there. The Rural Water Supply Network, RWFN, has a very active online community on sustainable groundwater development, and you might be interested in joining. And I've put the link on the slide. Unfortunately, I'm not able to type in the chat box. I'm not sure why I have this end, but it doesn't work. But you can see the links there on the slide. And I just like to close with a reminder that it's drillers who are at the heart of manual drilling. And thank you very much for listening. Back to you, Susan. Great, thank you so much, Kirsten. And I have a few questions for you that I've come up with, and we have some from the participants as well. One of them is just your big picture. Is a driller able to make enough money to have a livelihood? You know, are these single people? Are they groups of people? Are they typical businesses? Very nice question. Some drillers are. I mean, I've met all sorts of drillers. I've met very proud drillers who have told me that they can now afford to have more than one wife, which in countries where that's the practice, certainly shows that they are doing very well. There are also drillers who are struggling and who have other jobs. So there's a huge variation. It really depends on the drilling market. Certainly, where drillers are well-established, doing good quality work and are promoted. Yeah, manual drillers can certainly make a very good living. I mean, I've met drillers, one, yeah, several drillers. One story is of a driller who started up, actually, as a driver. It's documented in the compendium. He started off as a driver for an NGO. He learned the techniques as a driver over many years until finally branching out with his own business. He now employs about 14 people, so people drill for him. So yes, people can make a living from manual drilling, and some are incredibly proud to do so. So that's great. And do things like professionalizing them and asking them to be legally registered, is that maybe a turnoff for some of the smaller groups? Because maybe they're worried about fees or taxes, that sort of thing? I think it depends for who drillers want to work for. So if drillers want to work for clients who put out tender for multiple water wells, then they'll often have to be registered, and that's part of the professionalization of the sector. For brand new startups, I mean, for example, in the photographs here on the left, you see five drillers in the picture. Almost certainly one or two of those will branch off and start their own companies. And like in any business, in the early years, you're desperately trying to win business. Maybe you're registered, maybe you don't. So it's certainly not putting people off from starting drilling businesses. And when I look at the mushrooming growth in Nigeria, yeah, or Bangladesh, it's not an issue really. Great. And do you see that the growth comes sometimes from other people seeing their success, that they say, oh, this is a great business to get into, or is it more from outside organizations through promoting it? So my instinct, I haven't done a systematic survey to ask drillers why they're drilling in who. So I don't have the evidence, but my instinct would say it's from seeing others, where it's really taking off, it's from seeing others. But in the early years, people need to see that it's possible at all. So at the introduction stage, where drilling isn't happening, manual drilling isn't happening in a country or an area, people from outside need to come in and show. And that could be drillers from neighboring states or from neighboring countries or organizations from overseas. OK. And then to get to the bigger picture, you mentioned, I think, 36 countries where manual drilling is happening. And the question from one of the participants was, why do you think that manual drilling has stopped in some countries that used it in the past? And what other methods have replaced it, if any? OK. So I mean, I can talk about South Sudan, for example. The rigs that I've seen in the country, which there's other efforts to start getting them working again, during the war, there were issues of replacement, replacing spare parts. Although in some parts of South Sudan, actually, manual drilling was practically the only way to drill. But getting spares in, particularly for these kind of customized rigs, where it's not so easy to make spares locally, whether they come from outside, that can be a barrier. Also, fashions, as in anything, fashions come and go. There was a lot of auguring that took place in Uganda in the early 90s, particularly around the lake, also a reaction to the contaminated lake water with the Rwandan genocide. And then things moved on. The more smaller rigs came into the country. Manual drilling was considered a little bit of a second-class option. The private sector came in, rigs were sold off from the government to private enterprises. Some government staff became private enterprises. And manual drilling kind of went out of fashion. Yeah. So those are a couple of examples. I'm sure there are other issues as well. Chad is also interesting. So the manual drilling of the 1980s got quite a bad name, certainly by government, for being low quality. So although it quietly continued in the kind of household level, private sector, it certainly wasn't mainstreamed by government. And then another wave came in later with the UNICEF support. So very different reasons by context specific. Sure. And related to the country level, all of these countries have some kind of regulation or standard. And oh, no. I mean, huge, huge variation. So some countries have standards. Some countries, some organizations think they have standards. But having standards, having those standards that are widely known about by everybody are widely used or a whole set of different issues. I mean, in Nigeria, never mind manual drilling, Nigeria has a code of practice for conventional drilling. But some of the conventional drillers don't even know that it exists. So there are come some quite significant issues there. Well, and along the lines in the places where there are any kind of standards or regulations, what are the consequences for a driller who doesn't follow them? And how would anybody know? I mean, where there are standards, and they're enforced particularly by public authorities, I mean, then they are supervising the work. So what should happen is that if the work isn't done, specification of the driller isn't paid. And I'm now talking more generally about manual and machine drilling. So there can be processes where drillers can be blacklist days. But the quality assurance and regulations of drilling certainly in many countries is nothing where it should be, nothing. I think another big problem is you often have individuals managing programs which include drilling, whether conventional or manual, who may not know anything about the vagaries of drilling. So there are a huge set of issues. I can talk more about those, but let me stop here. Next question. If we have time, we can talk about those later. That's great. Let's see, there's a few more from the audience here that what are the alternatives to manual drilling and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each? OK. I mean, manual drilling is a niche technology, or manual drilling offers a set of niche technologies. You're looking at soft formations. You're looking at groundwater. You don't want to drill much more than 40 meters, although as we saw from the Bangladesh example, there are examples of drillers drilling much deeper. So where you can drill a manually drilled well, I would argue drill, because it's cheaper. And you can get to places where possibly you can't get to with machine drilling. When I wonder how many machine rigs can navigate the islands of Lake Chad, for example, whereas manual drilling equipment can get there and has potential. I mean, if a well is properly sited, is properly drilled, designed, supervised, completed, whether it's manually drilled or machine drilled, actually shouldn't make any difference whatsoever. But of course, when you're looking at deeper water, when you're trying to get through harder formation, to basement rock, for example, you need to have machine drilling, mechanized drilling. And of course, there are a whole suite of other technologies suitable for accessing water supplies. So gravity flow schemes, tapping springs or other waves or tapping the springs with outlets. And there are a whole set of other technologies rainbow to harvesting. So that really depends on what's appropriate for the area, what the users want, what's affordable, and what can last. Great. To get back to the drillers themselves, are there cultural challenges that you've noticed with respect to professionalism, ethics, like following the standards, and maybe the overall growth of manual drilling as a livelihood that's popular? Cultural factors. What do you mean exactly? Well, this is a question from the audience, that they were assuming that maybe that some people would want to do better work for people who are, that they know, or something along those lines. I don't know, maybe you have something. I mean, and I've interviewed so many different kinds of drillers, both working on mechanized drilling and machine drilling. And some are incredibly proud people who really want to do a great job and who will refuse work if it's too cheap. Others will do work even if it's cheap. And I think that's true across really all societies. So I don't think there's a cultural issue there. One of the really exciting stories I heard was from Wari in Nigeria. I think it's Wari in Nigeria, where there is a manual drilling association. And they've got a kind of tight-knit community. And if one of the drillers doesn't drill to a good standard, he gets huge problems with his peers in the association. So I've heard stories of drillers drilling second well at no cost because they want to make sure that they don't lose their accreditation of the association. And those are Driller Center, Driller Run initiatives. That's a particularly interesting one, I think. Yeah. Okay, here's another question from the participants. This is good quality wells built on a professionalized in-country base of drillers, built by, I should say, that drillers is half the story with respect to providing clean water. With the majority of installed pump systems in failure mode, what is being done or can be done to address this? So I guess this is something about the maintenance and management of the wells. Okay, very good question. I'm interested that it's the majority in failure mode. And I wonder which statistic he's using. The figure that certainly RWCN put out 2009 was that about one-third of hand pumps installed were not working. That was a very rough data, the rough statistic also based a lot on stakeholders' own knowledge. And some of it was quite anecdotal. There's much more nuanced research taking place now. I mean, the whole question of sustainability is key. And I would say that I think a number of organizations, yours included, are starting to take that through a little bit more by the horns. Some countries have very high functionality statistics. Gain name is a particularly interesting case where they're way in the high 90s. But in terms of ensuring sustainability, there are a whole set of issues that need to be considered, such as available spare parts, mechanics who can replace the pump if it fails or if something breaks down, if it's a community source that people can raise the funds or can get help if they have particular problems. They're a whole suite of things around sustainability. But I think we'll go beyond today's webinar. But there certainly are a number of organizations who are both researching this issue and trying to tackle it head on. Great, and regarding the statistics, I was at an event last week where it was the Water Data Point Exchange and they had done some preliminary analysis of, I think, 230,000 data points from various countries and they found, I think, one out of four water points was not working. And that was across several years. So I'm not sure what the current stat is, but yeah, there are different numbers. But yeah. Okay, numbers. And I think it's important. You know, it's not majority. And I think what's important is to understand why and there's a very interesting project that's really getting into its second phase in this umbrella called UpGrow and it's trying to really understand why because some hand pumps fail because the borehole was never drilled properly or was never developed properly in the first place. So really understanding the reasons are extremely important kind of diagnostic. And my work in South Sudan recently and another project I've been urging government and stakeholders before they rehabilitate to really do a thorough diagnostic of why this borehole failed and to start to document because so much of this information is extremely anecdotal. Totally agree. And actually with that in mind, another question that I had regarding the drillers is the technology appropriate for particular areas. Are they just doing what they know how to do? Are they thinking about or having those conversations with the community about what they can maintain? That sort of thing? So it really depends who pays. I mean, if a non-government organization or a government is paying for the source, so that means it's providing a community source, that conversation needs to happen also with the community and the funder of the work. In the case of private sources, the conversation is between the individual and certainly in Nigeria and increasingly in Chattis individuals who are buying their own wealth. That's a discussion between the two. And I mean, some of the drillers I interviewed in one particular driller in Nigeria who is really expanding from the software formation into hard information. So he wants to drill low cost wealth into areas where I would question really whether it wouldn't be better to use a mechanized rig. But they certainly don't have problem getting the labor to use manual drilling in these more difficult formations they're trying. So they're moving beyond the sediments. And that's, yeah, in Uganda, there were a lot of kind of questions though, is it too difficult for us to drill? We should use a machine here. Whereas you look at private sector Nigeria, they're also moving off into more difficult areas. So I'm very interested to see what happens there in the future. And those two drill bits in the earlier picture you saw with two, the one at the bottom is a Nigerian designed drill bit using suspension car springs to penetrate harder material. Yeah. So there's lots of innovation happening as well. That's great. And one of the participants asks, is there a limitation in terms of depth? You mentioned that 250 meters I think was very deep. That's right. So for manual drilling, is that an issue? I mean, as you can imagine when you're drilling, the deeper you go, the heavier your kit is. I mean, if you look at these guys in the photograph on the left, they're raising and lifting that equipment manually. That's hard work. That's really hard work. The Bangladeshi equipment is much lighter weight. It's also drilling through lighter for softer formations. One of the limitations, of course, is the pump. I mean, when you're talking about hand pumps, you don't really wanna go to more than 35, 40 meters anyway, as the deeper you go, the more difficult it is to pump the water. The Bangladeshi wells are certainly not installing hand pump in those wells. They're installing little submersible electric pumps to get the water up. But it's a labor issue. Yeah. And it also brings to mind, do they generally know the hydrogeology in the area? Do they know that the water is found at 25 meters or 50, or is that part of the consideration? People do, and that word travels around. I mentioned earlier, you may find a couple of the drillers in the photograph on the left. It's set up their own company. By the time they do, they'll have learned about particular formations where you're likely to find water. With a lot of the manual drillers, the technical training on hydrogeology is practically non-existent, and that's what UNICEF were doing in chat. They were trying to really provide drillers with an understanding of what is actually happening below the ground and how that manifests itself in the speed of drilling and the material that's coming up. And certainly, good training in hydrogeology can really help drillers to drill to the right depth, to place the screen properly, to use the right type of screen. There's a whole set of issues that can, that's part, again, of this professionalism process. But many of the manual drillers don't know much about hydrogeology. And machine drilling is a huge variation as people know how and how much people are learning on the job rather than in school. Sure, actually, that was another question. Is there any kind of formalized training as part of the professionalization process? Are they learning by doing? We would love to have that. I mean, I was involved in a project that was funded from the British government in Sierra Leone last two years, 2013 and 2014, trying to set up national standards for drilling. They're all on our website. And also, training. And, I mean, the difference that it makes, even to managers, and we had a couple of the directors and deputy directors also on their training course for supervisors, the difference that it makes for them to really understand the process and what it takes. It's phenomenal. I mean, it's early on an interesting case because there's been a lot of hand-dog wells done. Drilling for water is relatively underdeveloped. There's certainly drilling for minerals. And since it's so underdeveloped, the skills to supervise, to manage contracts are quite limited. So, the scope for raising skills around drilling, certainly in Africa, is enormous. The need is enormous. The funding, pretty limited, sadly. Yeah. But we're trying. It's totally over water, isn't it? Exactly. One last question for you. This is from a participant in Peru who says that she's interested in seeing that South America has manual, in South America, manual drilling is only taken off in Bolivia. Do you know anything about that? Is it about geology or are there other constraints? I think Bolivia is about a gentleman called Wolfgang Buchner and Emma. I mean, Wolfgang Buchner has been dedicated to appropriate technology for water for 30-plus years. And it's Emma, the school of drilling, that's really got manual drilling off and moving in Bolivia. And they run training courses, once a year, I think, at least. So, if the participant can make contact, I can certainly put him or her into contact with Emma in Bolivia. But they're an interesting group. Could you spell Emma? E-M-A-S-M-A-S. If you look in the compendium, the manual drilling compendium, if you just Google manual drilling compendium in 2015, you'll get it. But Bolivia is talked about and Emma specifically in the compendium. E-M-A-S, it's something in Spanish which I won't try to pronounce because I don't speak Spanish. Well, thank you so much, Kirsten and Iana. We'll take it over from here. Thanks, Susan. Thanks, Kirsten. This has been such a rich webinar and we truly appreciate the time you've both taken as well as the knowledge you've shared. For all of the participants, thanks for joining us today. You can see more information about the recording and just in general about our upcoming webinars at our website. The PDH code is listed on the slide for those of you who can get professional development hours for this. And we are sorry we couldn't answer all the questions the participants had today, but please do email us any additional questions you may have and we will pass them on to the presenters. So with that, I'd like to wrap our webinar and thank everyone once more and encourage all of you to become E4C members to receive more information about upcoming webinars. Thank you all. Have a great day, evening, morning, wherever you may be and we look to catch you on our next webinar in June. Take care. Bye. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye-bye.