Changes

Access to groundwater is not always easy, so many different types of drilling mechanisms (ranging in depth capacity and costs) are covered in this section. Africa, for example, is said to have rich amounts of groundwater, as compared with other continents. That said, machine-drilled wells are often too expensive for most of the population. Drilling ‘shallow’ wells (up to 35 meter depth) by hand, reduces the price of a well by a factor 4 to 10 compared to a machine-drilled borehole. This cost reduction enables NGOs and Governments to construct more water wells, but also ‘opens the door’ to villagers, farmers, schools and small communities to have a well constructed independently through the private sector.