Geographic Requirements

The choice of geographical location is a crucial element for our project. It must be implemented in areas of continuous rainfall throughout the year and mountainous reliefs for fast and powerful flow of water. In addition, the project aims to help isolated communities, deprived of fresh water supplies. The ability for societies in such extreme poverty to have a good quality of life is drastically hindered. Other factors such as the size of the population we will support and the politics involved in using the village natural resources will also have to be taken into account. Our project can only supply a small village (micro-community), but a different infrastructure will be needed for a larger population.

An ideal candidate for our first implementation would be the region of Upper-Guinea forest in the Republic of Guinea Conakry. It possesses the ideal topography requirements set out above, and local authorities seem cooperative, as our project group has already liaised with them on the matter. In fact, the project has been briefly presented during an informal lunch to Prof Ibrahima Boiro, the Guinean minister of Environment, Waters and Forest. He says that this was a realistic and needed project, and that he will be pleased to help us by facilitating the administrative procedures.

In fact, Upper-Guinea Forest is a tropical moist forest region of West Africa. It has an annual average rainfall of 1800 to 2300 mm¹. It is recognised to be a primary source for many major West-African rivers (including the Gambia, and Niger Rivers) and has an extremely high hydroelectric potential estimated at 19,400 GWh per year with only 1% of it currently exploited. The social and economic situation of the region is also important when considering the usefulness of a project such as ours. Indeed the country is ranked 178th of 187 countries as classified by the United Nations Human Development Index in 2011². 47% of its 11 million people live under the poverty line³ and electrification in rural areas is only 3%. The Upper-Guinea region itself, mainly rural, presents hundreds of villages that do not have any access to electricity or clean water. The benefits the communities could get from the project are extremely positive. Clean water would reduce a number of diseases such as cholera, malaria or Guinea worm disease that is still one of the most important causes of mortality. Electricity, on the other hand, would help to improve their social life, living standards and develop the villages micro-economy.

It is also worth noting, that this project has been in part inspired by the activities of Raleigh International, a charity and non-profit organization. Some members of our group have worked on a water gravity dam project in Malaysia, a technology essential and complementary to our own project. We could perhaps develop a cooperation scheme with this organisation.