Welcome!

Hello Everyone! The time has finally come for me, as a humble third year geography student at UCL, to make some impact in the world. The topic at hand will be focusing on the water and related crisis in Africa, and more specifically, the role of water resources assessment in the management of water resources and resultant consequences on other aspects of livelihood of people in Africa.

Now that must have sounded like quite a mouthful! To clarify, water resources assessment and management are two different yet inextricably linked matter. To effectively manage the water resources available, one must study and understand the system through various ways of assessments.  The assessments may be either qualitative or quantitative. These may include narrative descriptions of the extent and severity of flood and climatic projections of river discharge, flood or drought. Both complements each other and are vital in enabling a comprehensive understanding of water crisis. The information gathered can be turned into useful knowledge that can inform policy makers. However, this linear model of knowledge production does not always happen. Things get messy in the real world!

In this blog, I will aim to achieve the following:

• explain what water resources management is and its relationship to integrated water resources management
• address the need to have greater number of water resources assessment in Africa. 
• discuss the role of citizen science in water resources assessment
• disentangle the complex relationship between water resources assessment and management and seek to discuss why water resource managements sometimes could not go accordingly to the goals. 

The continual advancement in technologies e.g. remote sensing and better models, and hydrological theories mean the assessment will also be changed and improved continually.  This is and always will be intertwined with the ever-changing landscape of human geography in which different stakeholders with different attitudes and motives interact, compete and even compromise eventually. As with climate science, the ‘science’ itself is often contested and challenged by various stakeholder in various ways with different motives. It is my ultimate goal to unpack their messy interrelationship and hopefully this will contribute towards the contemporary challenges of water crisis in Africa.