A review of groundwater vulnerability assessment in Kenya

Groundwater represents 95% of the world’s unfrozen freshwater. The use of groundwater has significantly increased over the past 50 years and is expected to rise in future due to its high reliability during drought seasons, good quality, generally modest development costs and continuous depletion of surface water. Groundwater pollution is becoming a major threat to fresh groundwater availability and sustainability. The deteriorating groundwater quality and increasing contamination poses detrimental risk to human health and ecosystem in many ways, thereby necessitating the need to study the groundwater vulnerability assessment as a preventive strategy to protect the groundwater from surface pollution. The concept of groundwater vulnerability assessment is dated back in 1970s and applied in many developed countries as an environmental tool used for proper land use planning and decision making without jeopardizing groundwater quality.  This paper is a detail review of available literature on the study of groundwater vulnerability assessment in Kenya. The paper revealed that, the vulnerability assessment concept has not been applied as a mechanism to prevent groundwater pollution, hence rarely used in guiding land use planning in Kenya. This review brings to limelight the importance of groundwater vulnerability assessment in management and protection of groundwater resources in Kenya.*Corresponding author; Email:guyesa2016@gmail.com Mobile: 0710953283.1. Soil, Water and Environmental Engineering Department Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Kenya