Studies carried out over the last twenty years have shown that Burkina Faso is a vulnerable country in terms of water resources. With low, random and unevenly spread rainfall, the country does not have very substantial aquifers able to supply high flows. Since the 1980s, periods of drought have increased and groundwater levels have been reduced. Ongoing climate change is threatening the livelihood of a population that lives mainly from agriculture and livestock farming. These observations led to the implementation of a sustainable resource management strategy, which SHER, an Artelia subsidiary, is now helping to develop.

Our teams are carrying out a number of studies to this purpose. They are carrying out geological and hydrogeological characterisation of aquifer systems in sedimentary basins in several regions, and developing management models for some of them. They are identifying groundwater mobilisation infrastructures (45,000) in a database and creating a web application to manage them. They are also studying the optimisation of the piezometric network and the water quality network throughout the country. Artelia has also been asked to update the hydrogeological map and the overall assessment of the country’s resources, creating a geological and hydrogeological model of the western sedimentary basin as a decision-making tool.