The Pursuit of Clarity: Why are we building the Online Water Library (OWL) ?
13/06/2026
13/06/2026
The Sudan civil war, which erupted in April 2023, is an ongoing conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, leaving tens of thousands of dead, forcibly displacing 12 million people, and causing countless libraries and places of learning to burn to the ground.
However, SUDAAK or the Sudan Association for Archiving Knowledge — a Sudanese NGO established in 2004 to preserve their nation’s scientific heritage—has come to the rescue !
SUDAAK maintains a significant collection of historical geological surveys, well-drilling reports, and field studies related to Sudan’s water resources.
Recognising the urgency of preserving this data, SUDAAK has become a key partner for Global MapAid, and Databricks our data sciences partner, serving the OWL project under their “Databricks for Good” initiative.
By sharing Sudanes digitized water documents, reports, and maps, SUDAAK enabled us to build an online demo prototype library containing 650 documents, to help researchers locate vital information.
As Neil Armstrong on July 21 1969 said: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
The Online Water Library or OWL, serves two critical, consecutive purposes:
While our initial digital framework was built using this Sudanese data, the ultimate goal is to scale this solution across East Africa—starting with our urgent work in Ethiopia.
Urgent, because climate change respects non of us, and is coming fast.
Today, over 47 million small subsistence farmers in Ethiopia live below the World Bank poverty line. For these families, water access is the number one challenge. Securing a shallow well can double or triple their food supply; for them, it is like winning the national lottery !
Currently, however, drilling for water is often a costly gamble. Without the right historical data, the success rate for deep wells can be as low as 30%. This represents a massive waste of precious money—funds that could have built more wells or fed more families.
Alongside drilling, there are other vital strategies, such as surface water catchment systems and soil moisture conservation methods. All across the world, over many years, excellent reports on these subjects have been researched and written. Yet today, they sit trapped in physical libraries. And in this regard, Ethiopia is no exception.
With climate change respecting nobody, these documents need to be placed immediately into the hands of Ethiopian government decision-makers, international donors, and development NGOs battling drought, and this will be exceptional, a world first.
We must use Large Language Models to synthesize these hard-copy files into new, cross-fertilized knowledge. Arguably, we are quite literally losing the war against climate change—and therefore poverty—because our data is trapped on paper.
Ethiopia is taking the initiative, following Sudan’s lead, to be among the first to confront this challenge.
[WellMapr AI / LLM] ➔ [High-Success Wells & Smart Farming]
While the OWL prototype currently runs on Sudanese data, we are already planning how to integrate Ethiopia’s vast water archives. This initiative is moving forward in reference to the National Consultative Workshop on Water Resource Data Management and Data Sharing Directive, a government-led convention which kicked off on March 27th, 2026, at the Capital Hotel in Addis Ababa. The Ethiopian national policy goals on water align 100% with Global MapAid’s vision for water data capture to benefit Ethiopia’s public agencies and small farmers.
By turning these forgotten paper documents into a searchable, professional digital library, we are unlocking information that has been hidden for years. Once digitized, this data becomes a superpower.
We are feeding this information directly into WellMapr™, our Ethiopian-led AI system designed to guide drilling. Our aim? To drive well success rates from 30% up to 75%. That isn’t just a technical win; it means more families achieve clean water and food security.
We aren’t doing this alone. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with the brilliant “Databricks for Good” team, the philanthropic arm of the data tech giant. They have helped us build our initial prototype, turning unstructured files into a searchable database for groundwater discovery.
While the prototype currently uses data from Sudan, the architecture is ready. Soon, we will apply this exact same technology to Ethiopia’s water archives. It is a vital, high-leverage investment that secures a national asset and directly supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation).
Our vision has always been to bust poverty and hunger down to the studs. This library project is a key part of that. It’s about more than just technology—it’s about empowering government researchers, academics, and farmers with the facts they need to change the future of Ethiopia and enable small farmers to find a new level of prosperity.
When this succeeds, it will be world first, and a great hope to other nations who have small farmers.
The work is just beginning, and the road ahead is long. But every document we scan and every report we digitise is a step closer to better water management and a more prosperous Ethiopia.
Onward !
Rupert Douglas-Bate
CEO, Global MapAid
The Databricks blog on OWL is here.
Ethiopian Government report:
