Serious Groundwater Game: Improving Groundwater Management Through Cooperation and Collective Action
Serious gaming can be a great tool for education and raising awareness. And such is the case with the Serious Groundwater Game developed by IGRAC. In this computer simulation, all players are part of a small rural community of farmers who irrigate their land using groundwater. The farmers try to maximize production of crops while minimizing their environmental impact, learning how to answer the questions — “What are the consequences for you as a farmer and as a community?” “What needs to be done so that everyone in the community will benefit?”
The Serious Groundwater Game was used as part of the GroFutures project, which had as its main objective to review integrated physical and social science research plans in the three focal basin observatories — Upper Awash (Ethiopia), Great Ruaha (Tanzania), and Iullemmeden (Niger/Nigeria/Benin/Burkina Faso).
During regional workshops in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Niger, the groundwater game was applied in “play and dialog” sessions with basin stakeholders. The Serious Groundwater Game proved to be an effective tool to improve basic understanding of groundwater resource management and sparked constructive dialog among stakeholders.
Recently, the game was also applied during a project meeting of the USAID-funded Kenya-RAPID project in Nairobi and will again be used as an awareness raising tool during the next in-project training.
International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre, South Holland, Netherlands
