A multidisciplinary group of UConn faculty and staff is hoping to help Ethiopia develop long-term solutions to water shortages.

UConn is committed to advancing hydrology studies and to bringing much-needed practical aid to regions of the globe where clean, plentiful water is scarce. Ethiopia is one of several East African countries currently facing drought.

In April, a multi-institutional team of researchers from UConn and Ethiopian universities was awarded a USAID/Higher Education for Development planning grant to support sustainable development and management of water resources in Ethiopia.

The team is headed by Michael Accorsi, Mekonnen Gebremichael, and Guiling Wang of the civil and environmental engineering department in the School of Engineering, and Jeffrey Osleeb and Carol Atkinson-Palombo of the geography department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The group aims to help Ethiopian universities increase their capacity to educate their students and conduct research and outreach that will contribute to solving the water management and distribution challenges that affect their country.

The team includes researchers from UConn and from the three largest universities in Ethiopia: Addis Ababa University, Mekelle University, and Hawassa University. Other partners are IBM, through its “smart” water management initiative; Bentley Systems, a leader in the development of water management software; and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The team was one of just 20 selected by USAID from more than 300 applicants to submit a detailed, long-term planning proposal as part of the Africa-U.S. Higher Education Initiative Grant Competition.

UConn Provost Peter Nicholls hailed the award. “UConn is committed to the application of our expertise to global grand challenges. What is more basic, more pressing, than water?” he said. “We are proud that UConn faculty are involved in this project to address Ethiopia’s water crisis and contribute to a transformative educational model that will allow Ethiopian citizens to solve the nation’s problems.”

Ambitious Plans

The project is ambitious and requires significant matching funds from private donors to trigger substantial government support.

According to Accorsi, plans include the development of an interdisciplinary, integrated water resources curriculum; graduate student exchange programs between UConn and its partnering universities; optimization of resource efficiency; centralization of water resource facilities, including databases and libraries; support for research and the research community; efforts to secure long-term funding to sustain the project; and the development of an Ethiopian Institute of Water Resources to facilitate these goals.

“Increasing the capacity of Ethiopian universities is critical to economic development in the country,” Accorsi says. “There is a tremendous opportunity, here and now, to make a difference.”

In July, six UConn team members traveled to Ethiopia to meet with colleagues at the three partner universities, as well as with officials from various Ethiopian water bureaus, ministries, and government units. They also visited various sites across the country.

Despite abundant water reserves fed by nine river basins across Ethiopia, including the Nile River in the northwest, half of the Ethiopian population walks up to four kilometers every day to fetch water; more than 70 percent of the population does not have access to safe drinking water; agriculture is primarily rain-fed, causing food insecurity, while less than 5 percent of the nation’s potential irrigable land is under irrigation; only 2 percent of the nation’s potential hydropower is utilized; and water-related diseases, such as malaria and schistosomiasis, are major public health problems.

The Ethiopian government has placed water at the forefront of its National Poverty Reduction Strategy. Despite the challenges, Ethiopia recently ranked second out of 53 African countries on the African Rainbow Consulting’s Star of Africa index for water resources and overall potential for successful investment.

Water, a Complex Problem

The multidisciplinary nature of the team reflects the complexity of Ethiopia’s hydrology problems. The engineering team members, for example, have significant expertise in rainfall and water resource prediction using satellite imaging, ground-based measurements, and complex modeling.

Gebremichael is conducting long-term hydrology studies in Ethiopia, and since 2006, with National Science Foundation support, has led student teams who installed weather stations and studied the hydrological processes in a key watershed of the Blue Nile basin region. His research on Ethiopian water resources is also supported by a NASA New Investigator Award.

He says Ethiopia experiences some of the world’s largest climatic variability, resulting in a highly variable distribution of water in space and time. “One major challenge to Ethiopian water resources planning and management has been the lack of reliable measurements,” he says. “Here at UConn, we have developed a tool that uses readings from government satellites and computer models to measure how much water is ‘available’ and ‘consumed’ across a large region.” This information has the potential to change the face of Ethiopian water resources development and management, he adds.

Other team members, including civil and environmental engineering professors Emmanouil Anagnostou, Amvrossios Bagtzoglou, and Allison MacKay, bring strong expertise in hydrology, climatology, meteorology, land surface modeling, water quality, and groundwater analysis.

Osleeb, professor and head of the geography department, is an expert in geographic information science, a discipline in which researchers use computers in conjunction with digital maps to analyze aspects of the Earth. His role in the project will be to help Ethiopian academic colleagues develop a spatial analysis curriculum. “My interest is in economic geography,” says Osleeb, “which means I’m interested in looking for the best location for facilities, in this case water facilities.”

Ethiopia’s water problems cannot be solved merely by drilling wells, or building dams or other structures. The USAID project is aimed at “building capacity,” helping the nation nurture its own problem solvers who can address water distribution problems.

“Although Ethiopia has excellent universities,” says Osleeb, “the academic model there is different. Ethiopian professors are not rewarded for research, while in the U.S., we expect faculty to not only teach but also carry out original research, publish, and mentor graduate students. This research focus helps us move from the textbook to solving the real-world problems around us. We will help our Ethiopian colleagues adopt a new model.”

Atkinson-Palombo, whose expertise is in the area of sustainable development, especially in cities, says geography has a tradition of encouraging thought about how place-specific factors influence the complex interactions between people, the natural environment, and the built environment.

“The field trips, particularly those in the semi-arid regions, reinforced the importance of the spatial and temporal mismatch between people and water resources,” she says. “Water is plentiful, but it is not necessarily where people live and occurs in pulses in distinct ‘rainy’ and ‘dry’ seasons. So there is a dire need for mechanisms to store and manage rainwater in agricultural areas where people are predominantly subsistence farmers. In more urbanized settlements, visible water-related challenges are providing the necessary infrastructure to manage stormwater and sewage.”

Guiling Wang, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Environmental Engineering Program, says, “The focus of our work is on capacity building. We won’t actually be solving the water problem directly. We will be helping our Ethiopian partners develop a more relevant engineering curriculum and a vibrant applied research program. At the same time, UConn faculty will benefit from increased competency in addressing global water issues and new partnering opportunities for research.”

Wang’s specialty includes hydrology, biosphere-atmosphere interactions, climatology, and hydrological forecasting.

Robert Weiner of Engineering Computing Services joined the team to assess the distance learning capabilities of the Ethiopian universities.

Additional members of the U.S. portion of the team are Anji Seth of the Department of Geography, Farhed Shah of Agricultural and Resources Economics, Jun Yan of Statistics, Eugene Salorio of Management, and Edward Rossomando of the Center for Waterborne Diseases at the Health Center.