In order to achieve sustainable groundwater production and reduce investment losses through failures in well drilling, there is a clear need to base development on knowledge of the suitability of targeted areas for groundwater development. Various attempts have been made in the past to identify and map potential areas for groundwater development
at varying scales. These include a global assessment at 1:25000000 scale (WHYMAP 2008), a
regional assessment at 1:40000000 scale (MacDonald and Davies 2000), country-level analyses—Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa (MacDonald et al. 2001, Woodford et al. 2006, Gumma and Pavelic 2012) and a basin-level (Volta) assessment (Martin and van de
Giesen 2005)