Adequate public water services are not provided in, or expanded to, informal unplanned urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Explanations in the literature range from technical difficulties, weak institutional settings, and poor cadastral information. Also, urban poor tend to lack the political or economic resources to exercise power within the urban arena to change their situation; rather, they are subject to commercialisation, industrialisation and 'full cost recovery' for water access. In such cases, groundwater is turned to as an alternative, mainly through private vendors, self-supply from own or shared wells, and/or NGO-run kiosks. However, groundwater of good and safe quality is scarce, either seasonally or at different locations throughout the urban area. Also, there is very little insight in the hydrologic cycle within the urban area, including surface water and groundwater flow patterns and interactions, associated transport velocities, dynamics of pollutant transport, and the presence of recharge and discharge areas in the urban area. Therefore, it is unknown if and how long natural groundwater reserves can sustain these increasing urban groundwater demands. Social, institutional, financial and environmental conditions make the dependence of urban poor on groundwater a challenge that may lead to reduction of the quality of living, income, and life expectancy of the urban poor. It can therefore be regarded a complex and persistent societal problem, which is highly uncertain in terms of future developments and hard to manage, since it is rooted in different societal domains. Also, these problems seem impossible to solve with traditional approaches and instruments or through existing institutions. What is lacking is information, integration, coherence, and systemic thinking. The solution to the problem is likewise complex and not straight-forward; it will involve different stakeholders, it requires social learning, and arriving at the solution is uncertain and will take a long time. Hosted by Local Transitioning Teams, and focusing on parts of Kampala (Uganda), Arusha (Tanzania), and Accra (Ghana), as examples of growing mixed urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, including poor people in slums, who depend on groundwater, T-GroUP will first firmly root itself in cutting edge demand-led interdisciplinary social and natural research. What are current and historic multi-scale groundwater use-regimes and multi-level governance arrangements, how were and are power structures and power dynamics present in these areas, and what is how do financial and economic factors come into play? These are the more social, governance, institutional and socio-economic type of question we ask ourselves. From the environmental and natural sciences point of view, we aim to unravel complex urban groundwater flow systems and patterns in pathogen distributions in aquifers using next generation DNA sequencing techniques and qPCR techniques we recently developed. Then, our project will turn into a socio-biophysical transition experiment. These areas described above become Urban Transitioning Laboratories in which we plan to implement a Transition Management Cycle (TMC), which is able to properly deal with the complex societal problem described above, and which can convert unsustainable water use into inclusive urban groundwater management, thereby focusing on the role and the needs of the urban poor. Key components of the TMC include multi-stakeholder platforms ('Learning Alliances'), strategic planning, and small scale demonstrations to show the promise in making the transition towards sustainable groundwater management. Being designed for development impact, the TMC is also subject of research: departing from a TMC we developed earlier, we aim to arrive at a TMC tailored to groundwater use in the complex context of our study areas, which can be replicated in other cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite significant investments in early warning systems, only limited progress has been made towards making flood prone communities safe (UN SDG Report, 2017). Forecast-based Financing is an initiative to enable humanitarian funds for early action to be released before a disaster on the basis of a forecast. The initial Forecast-based Financing pilot (FbF) project in North Eastern Uganda has highlighted the complexity in establishing vulnerability and response thresholds (Coughlan de Perez et al. 2016) to guide interventions. Scaling-up FbF across a nation is therefore a grand challenge due to the complexity of environmental, climatic and socio-economic factors affecting flood risk, the multi-sectoral (health, environment, water, transport) impacts and the range of factors affecting response at community level. Understanding the specific vulnerabilities of communities at different seasons, and their exposure to different types of flood threat is key to improving physical and livelihood risk assessment, preparedness, communication and response, The demand from the FbF community for impact-based forecasts at a national scale in Uganda therefore drives the need for a new approach that synthesises evidence from different disciplines including climate science, hydrology, and livelihoods. The NIMFRU project responds to this need, through a new approach that will provide comprehensive flood impact assessments for FbF across all areas of Uganda, complementing the SHEAR-FATHUM project's outputs on forecast skill with basic household economy/socio-economic information, to guide preparedness, protection and response. FATHUM's approach is the basis for NIMFRU's overarching aim, which is to improve the targeting, relevance and communication of flood warning and response in Uganda, through better integration and analysis of information on the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of different population groups to flood events across the agricultural year. Through linking with the FbF initiative, NIMFRU's research outcomes will inform developments for impact-based forecasting beyond Uganda. We will achieve this new synthesis of climate science and livelihoods analysis through our well established consortium of globally recognised leaders in hydrology, climate science and livelihoods research and practice, together with long standing stakeholder networks and existing, strong and equitable relationships with our project partners. With wide ranging and extensive local and regional knowledge of policy processes, our team has the critical capacity to ensure NIMRFU's work is fully embedded within national agencies including NECOC's flood information system, its humanitarian relief database and its emergency response mechanisms. This will ensure the project's long term legacy, its sustainability and its extensibility beyond the pilot districts, across Uganda, and to Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.

Increased food production is widely considered to be a fundamental step toward the reduction of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Although the agricultural sector account for two-thirds of the labour force, SSA is the only region in the world where per capita food production declined over the latter half of the 20th century. It also remains highly vulnerable to extreme climate variability and future climate change as almost all (>95%) food production is rain-fed. Consequently, calls for increases in irrigated agriculture have intensified in an effort to improve food production, livelihoods and resilience to climate variability and change. However, the reality on the ground in most parts of Africa is complex. It is not clear if there is sufficient water available to support significant increases in irrigated agriculture especially in an era of rapid environment change. It is also vital to ensure that such developments do not have a negative impact on the ecosystem services on which poor African producers depend, especially as competition for limited water resources intensifies. Nor is it clear that investments in irrigation development alone will automatically lead to reduced poverty since the principle reason poor people do not have adequate access to water lies in entitlement failures, not water resource scarcity or inefficient service (market failures) delivery. This is fundamentally an issue of politics, local governance and distribution and, therefore, requires a more sophisticated analysis of the problem framing and policy response. Therefore, we need to ensure that policies in agricultural development and water resources take into account the many biophysical and socio-political challenges faced by small-scale farmers in diverse, risk-prone environments and the root causes of inefficiencies and low yields that characterise food production in SSA. Given this context, we seek to develop innovative ways to address the complex questions of sustainability and poverty around food and water in Africa. Specifically, we will establish a new research consortium involving leading physical and social scientists in SSA and the UK, and partners in government ministries and international organisations (e.g. IUCN) to create a truly interdisciplinary research team. The team will communicate with small-scale farmers and other key stakeholders through meetings of basin management organisations and water user associations in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. This will allow the consortium to interact with and be informed by the expressed needs and priorities of small-scale farmers and other end-users of the ecosystems. Among other things, direct outputs of this activity will include a review paper for an internationally recognised interdisciplinary journal on the key challenges facing socio-economic and environmental science in reducing poverty through improved use of water for irrigation, a working paper, a dedicated webpage and a number of policy briefings in appropriate local languages. The most important output will be a full proposal for an ESPA consortium project which would aim to develop an integrated suite of modelling tools that incorporate both physical and socio-economic processes and are informed by a detailed understanding of local conditions and knowledge sets. Crucially, we will enhance these models with locally relevant information in order to contextualise hydro-climatic processes with socio-economic drivers within a consistent framework. Thus, they will allow interdisciplinary analysis of both climate change and development scenarios (e.g. changes in land use, crop types, water allocation, population and livelihood practices).