Presentation of the Best Practice
Target challenge
- Difficult access to water
- Vulnerability to climate Change
- Reclacitrance to use treated NCW
- Other (Please specify below)
- Flash-flood hazard and infrastructure/property damage from unmanaged runoff events; seasonal and chronic water scarcity affecting domestic supply, livestock watering, and rain-fed agriculture; progressive depletion and localised salinisation of shallow co
Area Typology
- Urban area
- Rural area
- Agricultural area
- Other (Please specify below)
- Rural, dryland, semi-arid coastal wadi catchments with dispersed Bedouin settlements; the peri-urban fringe of Marsa Matruh city; pastoral rangeland; rain-fed agricultural terraces on wadi floors and lower slopes.
Main beneficiaries
- Local Population
- Other (Please specify below)
- Rural Bedouin households across Matrouh Governorate relying on rain-fed agriculture, livestock, and shallow wells for domestic supply; the wider governorate population (538,546 according to the January 2023 CAPMAS census) is the indirect beneficiary group
Impact on the beneficiaries of your Best Practice:
Qualitatively, improved local water availability from check dams and cisterns is understood to support continuity of rain-fed cultivation and livestock watering through dry periods, and to reduce dependence on costlier alternatives such as trucked water in the most remote settlements. Quantified, independently verifiable impact figures specific to this practice (for example, measured changes in crop yield, livestock survival, or household time savings) were not located in the public record at the time of writing; IFAD's PRIDE monitoring and evaluation reports would be the appropriate source to confirm such figures before they are quoted in a catalogue entry.
Funding
- EU funding
- National funding
Used technologies / tools
- Soil infiltration
- Sustainable Drainage Systems
- Sedimentation
- Filtration
- ERT: Electrical Resistivity Tomography ;
- Time-Domain Electromagnetic (TEM) /DEM;
- TDIP;
- HEC-HMS;
- RES2DINV;
- IX1D;
- ArcGIS;
- QGIS
Implementation site
Marsa Matruh
NCW type
- Rainwater (RW)
- Other
NCW USE
- Garden Irrigation
- Field irrigation
- Ground Water Recharge
- Other (Please specify below)
Self-Assessment
TRL : Technology Levels
TRL9
Description of the innovative component:
The innovation lies mainly in bringing systematic near-surface geophysics into a field practice that, for most of its history, relied on surface geomorphological judgement alone. Electrical Resistivity Tomography and Time-Domain Electromagnetic soundings, applied by the DRC Geophysical Exploration Department in wadi systems such as the Fuka Basin (Elshenawy, Journal of African Earth Sciences) and at Ras El Dabaa (Zarif et al., Environmental Earth Sciences, 2024), have shown that resistivity contrasts can distinguish dry vadose-zone limestone, clay-rich aquitards, and the sandier alluvial intervals that actually hold and transmit water. Feeding this information back into the siting of check dams and cisterns — rather than relying only on topography — is the practical innovation: it is incremental rather than radical, built on established geophysical methods, but it changes how confidently a given location can be expected to perform before any structure is built.
Obstacles to implementation
- Lack of an adequate regulatory framework
- Lack of public acceptance of water reuse
- High cost of technological solutions
- Other (Please specify below)
- Subsurface heterogeneity of the alluvial and fractured-carbonate wadi fill, which is difficult to characterise from surface geomorphology alone and historically required either expensive borehole programmes or accepting higher siting uncertainty; limited
Obstacles to funding
NA
How your Best Practice is economically feasible ?
Financial continuity for this practice rests mainly on its integration within larger, externally financed rural development programmes rather than on cost recovery from water users. The original SDCMR infrastructure (from 1994) was capitalised through Government of Egypt and World Bank IDA co-financing of the broader SDCMR establishment programme; more recent expansion and rehabilitation is supported through the IFAD-PRIDE loan and grant (2019–ongoing). Harvested water is provided to communities without direct user charges, so the practice does not generate revenue to offset its own operating costs; its sustainability therefore depends on continued public and donor investment rather than on a self-financing tariff model.Result of this assessment
Enviromental impact
SDGs
Energy consumption comment
This gravity-fed system requires zero pumping energy for normal operation. Local cistern distribution pumps are unmetered (NA). Qualitatively, the energy footprint is very low compared to groundwater pumping or desalination alternatives.
Validation/upscaling
Yes. SDCMR has operated continuously since 1994, and its published institutional figures report several thousand water-harvesting and storage structures (check dams, cisterns, and reservoirs) across…
Potentiel of exploitation/outscaling
Excellent replication potential across the entire semi-arid Mediterranean dryland zone. Key factors supporting replication: (i) the geophysics-guided design protocol is technology-agnostic and can be…
Lessons learnt
The clearest lesson from this long-running practice is that the value of subsurface investigation became apparent only gradually: for most of SDCMR's history, check dams and cisterns were sited…
Recommandations
For practitioners considering similar interventions elsewhere in the Mediterranean: (1) where budget allows, commission at least basic ERT or TEM survey lines before finalising structure locations,…
Highlighted KPI
Technical indicators
Average Treated flow rate
m3/Day
Economical indicators
Average total Cost
euro/m3 terated/day
Without consideration of the depreciation period
Average O&M cost
euro/m3 terated/day
Social impact of the BP
Jobs created comment: NA