Assessing groundwater potential in Foumban and implication on urban planning in the context of sustainable development

Abstract

Water stress is an everyday issue in developing countries and especially in Foumban, a municipality located in the West Region of Cameroon between longitudes 10°40’-11°10’E and latitudes 05°30’-05°55’N. The failure of the water distribution system in the Municipality of Foumban (MoF) led the citizens as well as the municipal authorities to exploit groundwater. Unfortunately, an extensive hydrogeophysical field campaign, with incidental cost, is required because the groundwater potential is not priorly assessed. The main objective of this article is to demarcate groundwater potential zones of MoF. For this, six thematic layers contributing to groundwater occurrences are combined using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) on a GIS environment to produce a sound groundwater potential map. This map is classified into three zones: low potential for 39.06%, acceptable potential for 27.27% and high potential for 33.68% of the study area. This may help to increase the rate of productive wells (by focusing hydrogeophysical investigation on areas with high groundwater potential) using little financial resources.