Distribution of boreholes in residential layouts and implications for planning of Awka, Nigeria

Abstract

Lack of adequate public water supply to the inhabitants of Awka urban area since the urban water supply scheme at Imo Awka broke down over 30 years ago has been a source worry to successive governments since 1991, when the State was created. The government in an attempt to solve the problem started constructing boreholes at some areas in the town as a crash programme to reduce the water supply problem. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to investigate the distribution pattern of boreholes in some new settlements within the urban area to see whether their locations are accessible to the inhabitants. Data for the work were gathered from field observation and questionnaire to households from April to October, 2016. For the data analysis, quadrant and nearest neighbor techniques were used and quadrant results shows that our p-value of 0.620 for Ifite and 0.0082 for Okpuno, all are more than 0.05 indicating that the distributions are random. The implication of this is that some residents have better access to borehole locations than others revealing that little or no planning was done before they were located. The situation led to the concentration of houses close to areas with boreholes with attendant social and environmental problems. It is recommended that water boreholes should be sited in a regular manner as much as possible and where this is not possible water collection points should be divested from the borehole locations to avoid the concentration observed. Urban planners should factor this into their planning scheme.

Keywords: Residential layouts, Public Utilities, Planning and Demographic Data