Songon
Peri-urban · Sedimentary basin
A fast-growing area west of Greater Abidjan, heavily dependent on high-yield boreholes and exposed to groundwater-quality pressure from nearby farmland.
First project hosted on WATER4ALL-Africa
ANTICIP-EAU-CI
An integrated system to identify, understand and rank current and future risks to water supply — connecting household needs, water-point infrastructure, groundwater resources and environmental evidence into one decision-support framework.
Design complete
Prepared for the FPNR 2026 call. No funding award is claimed.
Why anticipate
A working water point today is no guarantee for tomorrow
A community can have a functioning borehole today and face serious strain a few years later — from population growth, rising demand, seasonal variability, breakdowns, ageing equipment, changes in the resource, or water-quality problems. Intervention still tends to start once the difficulty is visible, even though the information needed to anticipate it already exists — scattered across household surveys, water-point inventories, borehole records, hydrogeological measurements, and climate and environmental data.
The problem in numbers
Investment has widened access, but a working borehole today is no guarantee of a safe, sufficient service in a few years — and the gap is widest where it is hardest to see coming.
- 77%
- At-least-basic drinking-water access (2024)
- 51% / 19%
- Safely-managed water — urban vs rural population
- ≈36%
- Population with a safely-managed drinking-water service
- 29.4M
- Inhabitants (2021 census); Yamoussoukro growing +2.6%/yr
Pacte national pour la sécurité de l’eau 2026–2030
Pacte national pour la sécurité de l’eau 2026–2030
JMP estimate (UNICEF / WHO)
INS Côte d’Ivoire, RGPH 2021
General objective
See water-supply shortfall coming — and give decision-makers what they need to act before it does.
Develop and validate an integrated anticipation and decision-support system that identifies, characterises and ranks territories facing a current or future risk of water-supply shortfall — connecting population needs to the capacity of infrastructure and available resources, so decision-makers can act earlier, target investments more precisely, and strengthen the durability of water-supply solutions.
The idea in one picture
When rising needs outpace what infrastructure and resources can supply, a shortfall opens up. The system is built to see that gap coming.
Four specific objectives
Each objective is one stage of the workflow, and each feeds the next — from a shared evidence base to a protocol other territories can reuse.
- 01OS1 · Observe
Build a shared evidence base
Combine household access conditions, water-point status, borehole characteristics and relevant environmental information into one harmonised, traceable dataset.
- 02OS2 · Anticipate
Model future risk
Develop and validate spatio-temporal models that estimate current vulnerability and supply-tension risk at 1, 3 and 5 years, with explicit uncertainty.
- 03OS3 · Prioritise
Rank where to act first
Build a multi-criteria water-priority index and decision maps combining vulnerability, future risk, water quality, infrastructure capacity and data sufficiency.
- 04OS4 · Transfer
Test it with real users
Test the tools’ operational relevance with end users, then formalise a reproducible protocol for extension to other Ivorian territories.
Three contrasted pilot territories
Chosen to test the approach across a peri-urban–urban–rural gradient and a sedimentary–basement contrast. This working selection may still be adjusted before fieldwork begins, without changing the project’s scientific objectives.
Yamoussoukro
Urban · Basement aquifers
An expanding urban centre where groundwater exploitation depends on weathered and fractured basement rock, testing the approach against growing urban demand.
Téhini
Rural · North-east
A rural area of the Bounkani region, where partial water-service coverage and hydro-climatic variability have been linked to drying sources and borehole malfunctions.
One evidence-to-decision workflow
The methodology follows a single loop, repeated as new observations arrive — rather than a one-off snapshot.
01
Observe
Household and community surveys, water-point and borehole inventories, water quality, hydrogeology, geophysics, climate and environment.
02
Harmonise
Consent and provenance, quality control and units, georeferencing, documented handling of missing values, one spatio-temporal database.
03
Anticipate
Current vulnerability, demand versus capacity, risk at 1, 3 and 5 years, with uncertainty and data-sufficiency reported alongside every estimate.
04
Prioritise
A water-priority index, decision maps, quality-alert signals, and a recommended next observation or action for each territory.
05
Validate & transfer
Cross-site field checks, workshops with end users, model recalibration, and a reproducible protocol for extension elsewhere.
A three-year work plan
The design phase is complete. Field and modelling stages are planned to begin once the project moves into deployment, and will be updated here as they progress.
Design phase
CompleteProject design & preparation
Objectives, methodology, pilot-territory selection, work plan and budget prepared for the FPNR 2026 call.
M1 – M14
PlannedData & territorial diagnostic
Protocols and ethics clearance, baseline household and water-point surveys across the three pilot territories, a seasonal revisit, and one harmonised evidence base.
M7 – M24
PlannedProspective risk modelling
Spatio-temporal models estimating current vulnerability and supply-tension risk at 1, 3 and 5 years, validated across sites with explicit uncertainty.
M13 – M30
PlannedPrioritisation & decision support
Calibration of the Water-Priority Index, decision maps and a first decision-support prototype for institutional users.
M19 – M36
PlannedField validation & transfer
Cross-site validation, workshops with end users, model recalibration, and a reproducible protocol for extension to other Ivorian territories.
Work packages overlap by design, so evidence keeps improving models and priorities throughout the three years rather than in one final step.
Expected outputs
Verifiable products, not promotional claims — each tied to a pilot territory and a stage of the workflow above.
Illustrative previewSchematic illustration of the six expected outputs — not project findings. Every surface below is generated for demonstration and carries no real measurements.
01 · A structured, harmonised evidence base
Field records, boreholes and prior studies consolidated onto one comparable grid across the three pilot territories.
LowerHigher
Project team
The people behind ANTICIP-EAU-CI
Researchers and engineers across geophysics, hydrogeology, water quality, hydroclimate and GIS, working alongside institutional advisers at ONEP. Select anyone to open their full profile.
How WATER4ALL-Africa supports this project
ANTICIP-EAU-CI is the first project WATER4ALL-Africa supports — its household and technician questionnaires shaped the platform’s own community and technician contribution forms, and its data model shaped W4A’s core schema. In return, W4A provides the governed digital infrastructure the project uses to manage its work: structured and consented data collection, quality control, traceability, mapping and the controlled restitution of validated results. W4A is infrastructure, not the research itself, and the project’s methods, models and findings remain independent results, evaluable on their own terms.
Governed collection, with consent recorded at the source
Provenance and quality control stay attached to every record
Controlled, privacy-safe restitution of validated results only
Prepared for
The FPNR 2026 call (Fonds des Programmes Nationaux de Recherche), administered by Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche Scientifique (MESRS). No funding award is claimed.
Proposal status
Project design complete for the FPNR 2026 call. No funding award is claimed.
ANTICIP-EAU-CI has been fully designed — objectives, methodology, pilot territories, work plan and budget prepared for the FPNR 2026 call. No funding award, partner confirmation or institutional mandate is claimed until an official decision exists. Territories, objectives and the schedule above are the working basis and will be confirmed as the project moves into deployment.