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''Guest contributor Arjen van der Wal is an environmentalist and drilling expert at Practica Foundation, an Akvo support partner. Here he describes the opportunities possible when people are trained to drill wells.''

Say you want to extract water from the ground, because you have had enough of carrying water around for six hours a day, and have more useful things to do with your time. And say you live in a region where the ground water is of good quality, and the soil consists of sand or clay. Then you might want to have a borehole, preferably near your house, where you can get nice, clean, safe water, without walking too far. What are your options?

Up to now, drilling boreholes involved large and expensive machines, which get the job done quickly and efficiently. Machine drilled wells are very high in quality, but also very expensive. The cost of a machine drilled well varies between countries and will generally be in the range of $5,000 to $15,000 for a 30-meter deep well. Unfortunately, this is so expensive that it is unreachable for almost all poor communities, and needs large subsidies to get done at all. And if large subsidies are needed, it does not scale. But a silent revolution to change all this is underway, and it is called manual drilling.

Manual drilling itself already exists for hundreds of years, but use by larger organisations has been limited, as the quality of the wells was often questioned. This is now rapidly changing, with large organisations such as Unicef embracing manual drilling as part of their technology portfolio. In the field of water supply, this is no less than revolutionary.

====Training, training, training====