Groundwater recharge, community water security, and practical engineering solutions in Northern Ghana

Résumé

Northern Ghana faces persistent dry-season water insecurity despite receiving substantial seasonal rainfall. This critical narrative review examines why wet-season rainfall does not consistently translate into dependable dry-season water access and compares practical responses across land, infrastructure, aquifer, and governance scales. Evidence from 65 peer-reviewed and selected institutional sources shows that the problem is not explained by a single regional groundwater recharge failure. It arises from the interaction of limited and highly seasonal effective recharge, rapid runoff and high evapotranspiration, strong local variability in fractured and weathered aquifers, weak storage and infrastructure reliability, and maintenance, financing, governance, and land-tenure constraints. Regional groundwater recharge estimates, therefore, describe broad replenishment conditions, but they do not by themselves indicate whether groundwater is accessible to a particular community or a borehole. The comparative synthesis shows that no intervention is universally superior. Rehabilitation of viable boreholes and surface water storage reservoirs can offer a rapid route to restore existing services where the assets remain hydrologically viable, although it does not increase recharge and will not remain effective without maintenance reform. Contour bunds and stone lines have strong field evidence for slowing runoff on suitable cultivated slopes, while zaï pits and half-moons are better targeted to crusted and degraded plots where labour and soil amendments are available. Soil cover, agroforestry, and farmer-managed natural regeneration provide complementary land-restoration and livelihood benefits, but tree density and tenure influence whether infiltration gains outweigh transpiration and adoption costs. Sand dams, recharge basins, managed aquifer recharge, and aquifer storage and recovery offer higher storage potential at selected sites, yet require hydrogeological screening, water-quality safeguards, finance, monitoring, and institutional coordination. The review concludes that improving dry-season water security requires a sequenced, site-specific portfolio rather than one regional technology. Immediate priorities are diagnosis and rehabilitation of hydrologically viable assets, followed by locally matched runoff-control and soil-restoration measures. Engineered recharge should proceed through monitored pilots where aquifer, floodwater, water-quality, and governance conditions are favourable. Across all options, performance should be judged by dependable and equitable dry-season service, not only by estimated recharge. This combined framing links hydrological variability with infrastructure conditions, livelihoods, and institutional capacity.

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