Digital innovation powers community-powered action on water quality in southern Africa

L-R: GroundTruth staff Nkosingithandile Sithole, Ayanda Lephane and Nicholas Pattinson.

The Enviro-Champs are a group of over a thousand people using citizen science to draw attention to water quality issues in South Africa. Supported by organizations like GroundTruth, they use simple but effective tools to collect data. Over the last few years, a partnership with CGIAR has shown that digital innovations can elevate citizen science as an internationally recognized source of data used by policymakers and as a career opportunity for young people.

In the global South, issues such as drought, overuse and pollution are threatening the health of rivers and freshwater systems, as well as the local communities who depend on them. Over two billion people don't have access to clean drinking water. Their plight goes unheard when local authorities don't have the resources to identify water issues, relying on slow and expensive laboratory water quality testing.

This is where citizen science can help. "We work with the Enviro-Champs to support us on the ground to collect data on rivers", said Futhi Vilakazi of uMngeni-uThukela Water.

Research by scientists at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and GroundTruth have shown that simple visual tools such as charts to identify and count lifeforms in rivers, or acrylic tubes to identify the clarity of water, can provide comparable results to laboratory tests.

Groups like the Enviro-Champs and other citizen scientists have readily adopted these tools, demonstrating the unique contribution that can come from co-engaged local communities. Citizen scientists can collect more data over longer periods, across large regions or with greater intensity. In one study*, volunteers monitored how water pollution from wastewater treatment works varied every day between 2012 and 2019. Less than two years after the treatment plant was made aware of this monitoring, their compliance with regulations shot up from zero to 60-70%.

Nonetheless, citizen science comes with its own challenges. The process remains highly manual and often paper-based, relying on the selfless dedication of volunteers to improve local issues. Although the community aspect can be a powerful motivator to local authorities, the data they collect are often seen as being too unreliable to use for management.

Through the CGIAR Initiative on Digital Innovation, IWMI, Groundtruth and key local partners are collaborating to develop technological upgrades that can transform the impact of citizen science.

This includes a smartphone app to digitize, geolocate and upload citizen science river health surveys, using the mini stream assessment scoring system (miniSASS), to an online platform. There have been >350 river health surveys submitted by citizen scientists in 2024. An image recognition AI function was created to recognize lifeforms in the river that indicate water quality, helping verify the data in real time.

Read more: AI to unlock the citizen science revolution

"Our technological upgrades to miniSASS mean that it is easier for citizen scientists to use and allows them to collect credible data that they can use for reporting on freshwater quality and river health, and hopefully allow us to work towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals", said Nicholas Pattinson, GroundTruth research scientist.

CGIAR also brought in UNICEF as a partner to upscale training in citizen science and encourage youth participation through its blockchain-based Yoma digital marketplace. This provides reimbursement incentives to participants and a digital CV of their skills, with over 500 people engaging with the online platform and building skills in online learning, miniSASS, ecological monitoring.

"Having that digital CV and the skills that they are able to assign to their CVs, they can move forward into the green marketplace," said GroundTruth director Mark Graham. "The South African Employment Fund (SEF) is also experimenting and seeing it as a really useful process of how it is possible to get youth who are typically unemployed to have skills and find more gainful employment."

Through this embrace of innovative technologies, citizen science can play a role alongside data from other sources, such as satellite remote sensing, in an ambitious project to create a virtual representation of water flowing in the Limpopo River Basin system in southern Africa.

"These citizen science data are now moving up to the Digital Twin, where these data can be visualized so that managers can see what is happening and start taking local action", said Graham.

* Funded by GroundTruth, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) through the CGIAR Digital Innovation Initiative, and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and in collaboration with North-West University, the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Centre for Water Resources Research (CWRR), uMngeni- uThukela Water, the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), the Water Research Commission (WRC), and the Duzi‐uMngeni Conservation Trust (DUCT).

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