Access to drinking water, a major challenge in the Philippines.
The drinking water crisis in Metro Cebu is critical. The city, the second largest in the Philippines after the capital Manila, suffers from the poor chemical and biological quality of its tap water and aquifers. Maud Toussaint Schurmans, an electrical engineer from UCLouvain, went out into the field to meet stakeholders and listen to their needs. This was part of her final year project, which won the Ingénieurs sans frontières – Philippe Carlier 2024 prize and a HERA award (sustainable engineering category).
“The innovation of my approach lies in the direct involvement of users in the process of designing chemical and biological pollution sensors, a rare practice in engineering. By translating their real needs from the outset, the frequent mismatch between the technologies developed and the expectations of the end users can be avoided.”
A complex problem
In the Philippines, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, freshwater resources are under pressure from climate change. What’s more, some places are slowly sinking into the ground as a result of overpumping of groundwater in response to an economic and demographic boom. As a result, salt water seeps into the land and contaminates freshwater springs near the coast. This water then becomes brackish. Freshwater is also chemically and biologically polluted by poor waste management.
This is compounded by the expansion of urbanisation, particularly in Metro Cebu. There, as in other parts of the country, access to freshwater is not guaranteed in terms of quality or quantity. “There are major problems in managing water resources due to lack of data, budget, time and people. Institutional problems exacerbate this poor management”, explains the researcher, who carried out her work under the supervision of Jean-Pierre Raskin, professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Louvain.
Under these conditions, groundwater and surface water often contain levels of contamination that exceed the health safety thresholds set by the WHO.
Water at a premium
To carry out her research and meet stakeholders, Maud Toussaint Schurmans travelled to Metro Cebu from the beginning of April to the end of May 2024, at the height of the El Niño episode. “Extreme heat, drought, lack of drinking water, extremely low water resources and extreme pollution: this gave me an idea of the worst possible living conditions there. In whole neighbourhoods, when people turned on the tap, there was no water at all. They had to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to go and fetch water from a well a kilometre from their homes to wash themselves,” recalls Maud Toussaint Schurmans.
And for drinking? A parallel market has sprung up. “Water vendors sell distilled or demineralised water at high prices. Their number is growing all the time because this market is very profitable. Even when water does flow from the taps, they compete with the public distribution networks because the local population has lost confidence in the quality of the water supplied.”
Accessible, accurate, manageable and repairable
On the islands of the Philippines, getting a water sample to a laboratory is no easy task. To get there, you have to take a boat and spend hours in the endless traffic jams that clog the archipelago’s roads. “What the Filipinos need are portable pollution sensors that give highly accurate results,” so they can do without laboratory analysis.
“But at the moment they can’t find anything that suits them in terms of price, accuracy and, above all, ease of use. This last point is crucial because the islands are characterised by valleys and hills: some rivers and waterholes are difficult to access. You need to be able to walk easily with the sensor over this difficult terrain. It’s also hot, so you need to be able to take measurements quickly and easily, ideally with just one hand.”
“Portable sensors should also be able to provide instant results, allowing quick decisions to be made and avoiding the use of contaminated water. The low cost of the sensors would also make it possible to multiply the number of tests, thereby promoting effective prevention of water-related diseases and improving people’s quality of life.”
“There is also the need to be able to maintain and repair the sensor if it breaks down. The current sensors are high-tech, complex to use and require sending them abroad for repair. The Filipinos don’t want that.”
University Development Cooperation
The research was carried out in partnership with the Water Resource Center Foundation (WRC), a hydrology centre of excellence affiliated to the University of San Carlos on the island of Cebu in the Philippines.
The results will serve as a framework for the development of sensors that meet the needs of the local population, currently underway at UCLouvain. They will also feed into the CarAqCol project (From groundwater to water consumption: Multidisciplinary characterisation to support sustainable aquifer exploitation in coastal metropolitan areas of the Philippines), which started at the end of December 2024 and will run for five years.
Funded by the ARES university cooperation programme, this collaboration between UMONS, UCLouvain and WRC is specifically aimed at addressing the water supply problems of coastal cities in the Philippines. The aim is to support the local development of groundwater expertise from a hydrogeological and economic perspective. And by gaining a better understanding of how aquifers work, the demand for water and the factors for potential change.
