Evaluation of Hand Augered Well Technologies' Capacity to Improve Access to Water in Coastal Ng[oumlaut]be Communities in Panama

Amid the global efforts surrounding United Nations' Millennium Development Goal Target 7c to improve access to safe and sustainable drinking water among populations who lack this resource, it has become essential to monitor and evaluate progress. Development initiatives working to achieve improved drinking water access often introduce appropriate technologies designed to be sustainably owned and operated by populations in rural areas suffering from water related hardships. It is valuable to thoroughly examine the degree to which these technologies satisfy intended objectives and affect user experienced water access. The accurate reflection of impact and progress can be complex, as the evaluation of water supplies can be made based on a variety of indicators that range from "improved' or "unimproved" water source definitions to measurements of the capacity of a source to satisfy desirable conditions related to water quality, quantity, reliability, or user's preference. The goals of this research are to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the effects of two appropriate technologies on local water access using an assortment of methods including: water quality analysis, visual and manual inspection, user interviews, and an overall sustainability analysis. In Panama, the indigenous Ng[oumlaut]be people in the [Ntilde][oumlaut]Kribo coastal area are a group disproportionately affected by a lack of improved access to drinking water and challenges to the feasibility of piped gravity fed water systems that typically serve the rest of the country. An NGO aiming to ameliorate this situation introduced two improved groundwater supply technologies to the region: bailers and EMAS hand pumps. This study assesses the comparative performance of these systems and evaluates the respective performances of existing water sources, using the wide variety of quantitative and qualitative data obtained. The data collected in this investigation suggested that bailers and EMAS pumps yielded a mixed level of performance based on physical, ...