Inventory of Rural Domestic Water Supply Points in Gombe State, Nigeria

Water of different types and circumstances is always available where people live. This is so because, people cannot live without water, and since it does not have alternative, they will not reside where there is none. Water is found in a locked up system called the hydrologic system, which involves huge quantity of water storage and transfer between the atmosphere, oceans, and land. Yet, renewable fresh water resources at all levels are insufficient to satisfy growing needs. The challenge for water service in light of growing competition for water is to ensure that sufficient quantities of good quality water are available for domestic and other uses. In order to have robust water service delivery, there is the need for every community or water consuming entity to have a framework which recognizes acquiring a stock of the available sources from which plans are to be made. This work attempted an enumeration of surface and underground rural water supply points, described the functionality of the sources in term of supplying water and what the water is being used for in rural homes. The study used a purposive method of selection to choose viable localities for the study, a random selection of respondents in the chosen localities and a FGD to substantiate interview responses. The study discovered a total of 913 rural water supply points in the 50 communities where the research was conducted. On the average, each community has 18 water supply points. These sources comprise natural and man-made types. The natural sources include rivers, streams, and shallow wells. The man made sources include hand pumps, deep boreholes, concrete wells earth dams, gravity flow, among others. Findings from the study also revealed that natural sources were at various degree of dryness, interview with beneficiaries revealed that 52% of the man made supply points were not functional, some 14.5% were temporarily down, and 1.8% of could not be ascertained, that means only 31% of the sources wer