Northeastern Brazil Groundwater Project

About PROASNE

Northeast Brazil is home to some 25 million people living in a 1 million km² area, and is often referred to as the most densely populated semi-arid region on earth.  Once every decade, on average, it is subjected to a severe El-Niño related drought that can last between two and four years.  These droughts are particularly devastating for the rural population by causing the disintegration of the main life-sustaining activity in the region: subsistence agriculture.  When droughts occur, a large proportion of the population, mostly the young working-age men, migrate out of the region, leaving the women, children and the elderly to cope with hunger and diseases, and to become totally dependent on inadequate government food and water distribution programs.

The Northeastern Brazil Groundwater Project (2000-2004), also known as PROASNE, is a technology transfer program funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) designed to help develop the region’s groundwater resources as a means of augmenting the long-term water supply for the rural communities, thus reducing the hardship caused by drought and improving living conditions in general.  But developing the groundwater resources in northeast Brazil poses special challenges due to the fact that groundwater is not plentiful and is difficult to find in the hard and impermeable Precambrian crystalline bedrock that underlies most of the region.  Also contributing to the problem are: low precipitation and very high evaporation rates; the fact that surface waters are mostly polluted and groundwater is generally brackish and unfit for human consumption without treatment; an inadequate supply of energy to pump, transport and treat water; and a poor and uninformed population, generally unaware of the basic principles of water conservation, surface and groundwater protection, safe farming practices, etc.