Ghana: VC calls for consistency in the maintenance of water systems

Professor Kwasi Kwafo Adarkwa, Vice-Chancellor of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), has called for consistency in the maintenance of the country’s water systems.

This, he said had become necessary to tackle the growing rate at which water and sanitation facilities provided for the communities are becoming dysfunctional.

He was addressing the opening session of the fourth international research workshop in Kumasi, to identify information, develop approaches and recommendations to promote access to acceptable levels of water, sanitation and hygienic services by people in the rural and peri-urban areas.

WASHCost Project Ghana, a research organisation, is hosting the five-day meeting with participants drawn from Ghana, the Netherlands, India, Mozambique and Burkina Faso.

“Quantifying the cost of delivering safe water, sanitation and hygiene,” is the theme.

According to official estimates, one in every three boreholes fitted with hand-pumps are not working in Africa. Additionally, most of the boreholes last for only three years instead of the designed life time of 20 years.

Prof Adarkwa said it was time that providers of water and sanitation services in developing countries developed what he termed “life-cycle cost approach” in their operations to improve the quality of their services.

This should involve routine maintenance of social amenities, strengthening the skills and capacities of professionals and technicians for the sustainability of projects.

Dr Kwabena Nyarko, Country Director of WASHCost Project Ghana, said access to water and sanitation services are not just critical to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals but a prerequisite for economic development.

He underlined the need for accurate information, especially for rural and peri- urban areas to make it possible to estimate the true cost of extending sustainable and good quality water and sanitation services to the poor.

For more information on WASHCost go to the project web site.

Source: GNA, 15 jun 2010

Tanzania, Zanzibar: Google and UN-HABITAT partnership to improve data collection

UN-HABITAT and Google have entered a partnership aimed at improving services offered by the Zanzibar Water Authority.

The project aims at improving access to information on water coverage, assessing the level of satisfaction by customers and evaluating efficiency in the delivery of services by the authority. The initiative is experimenting with the use of mobile phone networks to report faults in water supply systems and track efficiency in maintenance response through a web-based information system.

In the first phase of the project, a total of 50 water points have been constructed in schools, hospitals and other public facilities in the western part of Unguja island and will be managed and maintained by local communities.

Conventional approaches to monitoring levels of access in the water sector focus on tracking investments rather than assessing the results achieved through these investments. In addition, there is limited feedback from citizens and communities on the level or services received and on the performance of service providers.

Availability of information on service coverage in a form that is easily understood and accessible can play a key role in improving water governance, and facilitate targeting of investments to segments of communities with the greatest need. Communities that are empowered by access to information are in a stronger position to demand improved services from utilities and other service providers and can participate in identifying alternative approaches to meeting their water needs.

Current attempts to improve monitoring approaches have been hampered by the lack of reliable information at the local level, resulting in statistics which mask the true picture on the ground.

The partnership between Google and UN-HABITAT will establish citizen-based participatory monitoring techniques to support and empower targeted communities. It has developed new systems for collection of geo-referenced data which is disaggregated by gender and socio-economic group, and supported by information on the health and environmental status of the target groups and project areas. It has also established a system of benchmarking service providers not only to improve service coverage and efficiency, but also to enhance accountability to customers.

Source: UN-Habitat, 14 Jan 2010

Swaziland: more boreholes, no water

In Swaziland over 3,000 boreholes have been drilled in the country since 1986, but over 40 per cent of the population have no access clean water and about 90 percent of the community water projects are not functioning. Many boreholes have broken down and the communities, who were supposed to maintain them, lack the know-how or money to carry out repairs.

Read the full story below

In the drought-stricken area of Siteki, Tibuyile Maziya has been trying to fill up her four 20-litre buckets with water at a community for the last four hours. With a baby on her back and two more buckets to fill up, 19-year-old Maziya says she walks to this well at least three times a week to get water for her family of 15.

Siteki, a small town in the eastern part of Swaziland, has not had water for decades.

“Sometimes I spend the whole day waiting for the water to surface,” said Maziya. “You have to get here very early in the morning, otherwise you can go back home empty handed.” Sometimes when she comes to the well, there are more people than water available.

Besides spending so much time waiting for water and walking for three kilometres to the well, she still has to immerse a bucket inside and has to pull up the heavy water-filled bucket by hand.

Surprisingly, Maziya is standing next to a hand pump borehole and two hundred metres away there is another one. “All these boreholes are not working because they have broken down,” she said. The hand pump boreholes stopped working because of a mechanical failure. And there was no one around who could fix it. “For about two years now, the community has been relying on this spring for water.”

A lot of people in the country, especially those in the Lubombo Region, are still travelling long distances, and have to compete with livestock drinking at the streams for the water. Others rely on springs and wells.

But hand pumps and electric powered boreholes are a common sight throughout the lowveld and dry middleveld.

According to the director of the Department of Water Affairs, Obed Ngwenya, over 3,000 boreholes have been drilled in the country since 1986 but more than 40 percent of the country’s one million population still does not have access to clean water.

In fact, said Ngwenya, about 90 percent of the community water projects are not functioning because many boreholes have broken down and nobody wants to take responsibility. He said the idea is that once government or a development agency has put up a borehole at an area, the community should maintain it. “Although government and development agencies have tried to drill boreholes in many places to make water more accessible to the people, but we haven’t been very successful so far,” said Ngwenya. “Communities fail to repair these boreholes.”

The reasons for this vary. But mostly communities say they do not know how to repair the boreholes. And they are too poor to afford the services of a trained mechanic.

He said the country has only tapped onto only ten percent of its ground water resources although 90 percent of its people, the majority of which are from rural areas, depend on groundwater.

Many communities, said Ngwenya, using electric powered pumps fail to pay the electricity bills and the Swaziland Electricity Company cuts them off and they remain with no water.

A lot of community boreholes have run dry after pumping water for a few months. It is a sign that no proper assessment of available underground water at those places has been done, said Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Forum chairperson Jameson Mkhonta.

He admitted that there is poor management of groundwater in the country. “Until a year ago when the WASH Forum was established, there has been a lot of duplication of activities with regards to the supply of ground water at rural areas,” said Mkhonta, “Non-governmental organisations have been drilling boreholes in the same areas within a very short distance without any proper coordination which is the reason why some boreholes have run dry.”

The WASH Forum, which comprises of non-governmental organisations; United Nations agencies; government and companies that provide water services, has received about 1.5 million dollars. The money will be used to repair damaged boreholes and drill more boreholes throughout the dry areas so that people like Maziya could easily access water.

The forum has realised that, besides the fact that a lot of boreholes have broken down, some of them have not been installed properly in the first place, a blame Mkhonta attributed to some private companies whom he said cut corners when installing the pumps.

Another identified loophole, according to Natacha Terrot, the communications officer at Yonge Nawe Environmental Conservation Group, is that some companies drill beyond the stipulated six inch diameter.

“The haphazard manner at which boreholes are drilled in the country could mean we’ll find ourselves depleting the water table,” warned Terrot. “We need proper monitoring to ensure that people adhere to legislation and the stipulated guidelines.”

In the meantime, the management of groundwater resources is not only a challenge for Swaziland but for the whole Southern African Development Community (SADC). According to Barbara Lopi, the Communications Specialist SADC Groundwater and Drought Management Project, because groundwater is not seen, there is very little awareness around its importance at all levels of society and government.

“The real value of groundwater is not visible enough to influence policy decisions and resource allocation that could lead to improved use, development and management of the resource within the region,” said Lopi.

As a result, SADC is establishing a regional Groundwater Management Institute in South Africa which will be operational next year.

Source: Mantoe Phakathi, IPS, 28 Oct 2009

Africa: Water for People announces investment from Case Foundation to scale-up innovative rural water service models

Expanded effort to be based on social entrepreneurship, local involvement to provide multiple, sustainable water solutions.

Water For People has announced a transformative investment from the Case Foundation to accelerate and expand its efforts to provide innovative, sustainable water solutions in Africa. This investment will be used to expand Water For People’s programs, using local entrepreneurs to provide sustainable operations and maintenance support for a portfolio of community water solutions in Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Water For People’s expansion efforts will be focused first in Malawi, then in Rwanda and Uganda, to stimulate and scale up innovative models using the local private sector’s capacity to provide on-going operation, maintenance and repair services for an array of community water technologies. This will include an expansion of Water For People’s successful “circuit rider” program, where communities hire local entrepreneurs for effective operations and maintenance services that enhance water source sustainability.

As part of these efforts, PlayPumps International – U.S. will be contributing its inventory of manufactured pumps to Water For People. The combined, new resources total roughly $2M of funds, assets, and in-kind support, complementing almost $2M of direct funding from Water For People’s program base in Africa.

Water For People will use the resources to accelerate and expand its programs around the following core elements:

Engagement of the private sector. A key goal of the program is to unleash the power of the local private sector as a resource for community development. Initially focused on Water For People’s existing program in Malawi, and then expanding to Rwanda, Uganda and elsewhere over time, Water For People will offer proven entrepreneurial approaches, training and capacity building of local private sector partners to service a market for the ongoing operation, maintenance, and repair of community water systems. The program will also demonstrate ways that the local private sector can play a key role in eradicating water poverty.

Deployment of safe water system technologies coupled with innovative operation and maintenance approaches. Rural villages will be offered a portfolio of safe water system technologies (e.g. hand pumps, rope pumps, PlayPumps, etc.) in order to “road test” opportunities for scale. Private sector approaches for operation and maintenance of these systems a key element of sustainability will also be implemented. The emphasis will be on proven models, such as the use of local, independent contractors, or “circuit riders,” to service water infrastructure and ensure sustainable supply chains.

Long-Term Monitoring. Water For People is incorporating its long-term, 10-year community monitoring initiative into this program, utilizing the World Water Corps® volunteer program. World Water Corps® volunteers will offer professional and technical support including mapping, baseline data for development, capacity building for local stakeholders, and monitoring and evaluation of past and current projects.

Source: Water For People, 27 Oct 2009

Africa’s water crisis: a quarter of a billion dollars down the drain

[An estimated US$215-360 million] have been wasted on rural water projects in Africa, threatening the health and livelihoods of millions of vulnerable people according to a forthcoming briefing paper by the International Institute for Environment and Development.

[...] [ Some 50,000 water supply points]  in rural areas have fallen into disrepair, depriving poor communities of water because donors, governments and nongovernmental organisations have built infrastructure but ignored the need to maintain it.

The paper provides a 30-point checklist of features that rural African water supply systems need to succeed. They include the right technology, community ownership and local capacity to repair and maintain wells.

[...] Tens of thousands of new water points – such as boreholes with motorised or hand pumps – are created in Africa each year but many fall into disrepair after just a few years. Of 52 deep water borehole and supply systems built by the charity Caritas since the 1980s in Senegal’s Kaolack Region, only 33 still function today.

The Global Water Initiative has found that 58% of such water points in northern Ghana needed repair. In western Niger, it found that of 43 boreholes, 13 are abandoned, 18 are non-functional for more than three days once a year, and 12 are non-functional for more than three days, more than three times a year.

“It seems simple and obvious but it needs to be said: there is little point in drilling wells if there is no system to maintain them. Every day that a borehole does not provide safe water, people are obliged to drink from unclean pools and rivers, exposing them to water-borne diseases”, said Jamie Skinner, author of the IIED paper.

The paper says donors, governments and nongovernmental organisations need to realise that funding infrastructure is just part of the solution. Also important are better investments in knowledge, community-led management and government capacity to sustain water supplies. It says local communities must take part in choosing and maintaining appropriate technologies, and how much they are willing or able to pay to maintain them, rather than having them imposed on them by outsiders.

[Note: The above-mentioned issues are the focus of a new project of  the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. IRC  has received a US $22 million (€ 16.1 million) grant over six years to pilot the Sustainable Service at Scale ("Triple S") project. Triple S is a multi-country learning initiative to improve rural water service delivery by moving from project based, one-off construction of water systems to delivering indefinitely sustainable rural water services at scale.]

Download the paper by Jamie Skinner in pdf format

Source: Mike Shanahan, IIED, 20 Mar 2009

Senegal: private sector to operate all rural water supply systems

In just under two decades, the number of motorized boreholes in Senegal has quadrupled to about 1,400 water supply points, providing drinking water to 73 percent of the rural population. The Government of Senegal has decided to transfer the maintenance of all rural water systems to private operators before January 2010. This is in large part due to financial, human resource, and logistic constraints of the maintenance directorate in the ministry responsible for rural water development.

After more than 10 years of successful urban water sector reforms in Senegal, the rural water supply sector is now opening up to private sector participation. This approach builds on lessons learned from a successful pilot project implemented over the past 10 years, which saw the engagement of a private operator to maintain about 80 boreholes. Numerous domestic private operators have since shown their interest in this process and are ready to scale up this initiative.

At the request of the Government, [the Water and Sanitation Program] WSP will help define the regulatory role of the Directorate of Maintenance, as well as provide an intervention framework for the private sector. The Government is currently preparing to engage a private operator to handle the maintenance of 621 rural water systems in the central area of Senegal.

Contact: Pierre Boulenger at wspaf [at] worldbank.org

Source: WSP Access, Mar 2009

Zimbabwe: cholera still not under control, repairing sewage systems essential

Despite a decrease of the crude case fatality rate, the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe is still not under control, says  OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.  As of 19 February 2009, there have been 80,250 registered cholera cases and 3,759 deaths. Case attendance to health facilities is improving as a result of social mobilization activities and decentralization of care close to the affected community.

During a field visit on 18 February 2009 to Budiriro and Glenview, the worst affected areas in Harare, OCHA staff concluded that “it can be virtually guaranteed that cholera will continue to blight” communities unless “repair of dilapidated sewage systems” is made “a priority by the donor and humanitarian community: now and during the crucial ‘recovery’ months (May-August) before the next rainy season arrives”.

UNICEF WASH staff visiting Binga district noted a dramatic reduction in new cases of cholera, but at the same time an upsurge of malaria cases. Binga has less than 5%a low water and sanitation coverage, while recent national assessments have at times reported much higher access rates.

Recent reports indicate that up to 60% of boreholes are not functioning due to small breaks or malfunctions, which could be easily be repaired.

There is still a shortage of water treatment tablets and non-food items, including buckets, jerry cans and soap, OCHA notes.

Large quantities of IEC materials (over 310,000 flyers and 14,000 posters) have been distributed and Public Health and Hygiene Promotion (PHHP) training delivered to over 250,000 people.

See an example of an IEC poster below – a full set of IEC materials in English, Ndebele, Shona language is available here.

Read the full Zimbabwe – Cholera Update Update Report #14 of 20 February 2009 here.

Cholera alert (English) poster. WHO/UNICEF