A WATER RESOURCES PLANNING METHODOLOGY FOR WEST AFRICA (COMPUTER, MODEL, APPLICATION, SYSTEMS APPROACH)

The last decade has been a period of awakening for most African Countries as far as water resource planning is concerned. The abundance of water in most of the countries of West Africa has often been taken for granted. Even with the long history of water-borne epidemics, the problem has often been treated as a medical rather than as a sanitary one. With recent droughts and energy problems, there has been a change of attitude. However, water resource development has been hampered by the lack of data and/or trained personnel. The result has been a transplant of good, sophisticated models from developed countries for studying African water related problems. These models, with their extensive data requirements, are largely unsuitable for use in the data-short circumstance.; The purpose of this research is to develop a simple but reasonably accurate methodology for preliminary assessment of water related development opportunities in the area, incorporating a regional perspective in the evaluation. A programming screening model for project selection is formulated, followed by a simulation model for site specific analysis. Methods for multi objective planning and consideration of hydrologic stochasticity are presented. Computational experiences with the models and problems inherent in their practical applications are discussed. The procedure was tested by comparing the results of its application to the Volta river basin in Ghana with the project built in the late 1960's.; It is the author's opinion that beyond this research, it would be interesting to consider developing ways of including scheduling and temporal considerations in the planning process. These, and other recommendations, are discussed in the later parts of this thesis.