Harnessing Solar Water Pumping Technologies for Sustainable Water Supply in Kenya: A Case Study of Kajiado Central Sub-County, Kenya. A Retrospective Baseline Study

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:This provides empirical evidence on the trade-offs between cost savings and sustainability in solar water pumping, useful for water-energy nexus research.

🏢実務担当者:Water utilities and solar pump installers can learn about governance needs to prevent over-extraction and ensure water quality compliance.

🏛政策担当者:Regulators can use the baseline to design integrated water-energy policies and enforce spatial drilling limits and defluoridation mandates.

Kajiado County suffers from acute water scarcity caused by climate-driven droughts and surface-water deficits that severely threaten agro-pastoral livelihoods, forcing a reliance on groundwater extraction across unserved zones of Kajiado Central Sub-County. Weak regulatory oversight has led to uncoordinated, dense borehole clustering that causes localized static water tables to drop rapidly, while private water pricing strains household economies and unregulated extraction bypasses public health monitoring for hazardous geogenic fluoride. This study implements a comparative ex-post facto retrospective research design spanning a 10-year operational horizon (2015–2025) to evaluate the long-term performance of resource-efficient Solar Water Pumping Technology (SWPT) as an alternative to conventional diesel and grid regimes. Synthesizing Common-Pool Resource (CPR) and Socio-Technical Systems (STS) theories, the study relies entirely on archival secondary data sourced from the Kajiado County Ministry of Water, the Water Resources Authority (WRA), and public health registries, evaluated via statistical trend tracking and thematic analysis. The empirical findings reveal that while transitioning to solar water pumping lowers operational costs by 60%–75% compared to diesel, the zero-marginal cost of solar power creates an economic incentive for unrestricted over-pumping that accelerates aquifer drawdown, while the clean energy transition exhibits a major health compliance gap by routinely distributing untreated water that exceeds the WHO 1.5 mg/L fluoride threshold. Technical upscaling must be legally bound to institutional governance; this study provides an empirical baseline for the Kajiado County Government to enforce spatial drilling limits, embed solarized frameworks into the County Integrated Development Plan (CIDP), and deploy mandatory solar-powered defluoridation units to ensure long-term climate resilience and public safety.

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