Investigation of water potential harvesting sites in Karamoja.

Abstract

Water is one of the most vital requirements for economic and social development, spatial information on water availability in a region is essential to determine the potential of available water resources compared to the water demand of an area. Karamoja being a dry region several water dams have been constructed to provide water for household use and livestock, these water dams are not sufficient and this has caused disputes over the sources leading to violence and loss of lives. This study was aimed at investigating the water harvesting sites in Karamoja. In this study land use, soil type, precipitation, and slope was used to estimate surface runoff coefficient using the SC-CN model. The runoff coefficient obtained was combined with temperature in the water balance equation to determine the potential water harvesting sites (water availability). The water demand was calculated from water consumption by the population and land-use class of crop farming and livestock farming. The water availability index was then calculated from water demand and water availability. And finally, the existing water harvesting sites was accessed by overlaying them over the water availability index to check if they are reliable or not. The water availability model was tested by correlation analysis of the influencing factors with the water availability model. it is shown that r-squares are 0.9241, 0.9599 and 0.2249 and these shows that the influencing factors are well replicated by the model basing on the proportion of total variation of outcomes explained by the model. The water availability index was calculated by comparing the water demand and water availability and expressed as a percentage of water demand. The positive values showed that there is surplus of water in the area compared to the demand while negative value showed that there is a deficit of water in the area compared to the demand. The majority areas in karamoja have a very high deficit ranging(-80% - -100%). This is because Karamoja is generally a dry region with very low precipitation.The potential harvesting sites where investigated using the water availability index. The very highly defict regions have high population and high density of crop farming and livestock activities which need a lot of water for consumption. Those are areas of potential water harvesting sites. The very high surplus regions have low water demand compared to water availability.