Photo: Nebert Mulenga/IRIN

Safe water systems

SAMFYA,� – Inadequate access to safe water and poor sanitation facilities are fuelling poverty in Zambia, an NGO concerned with water issues told IRIN.

“There is a relatively high incidence of water- and sanitation-related diseases, particularly diarrhoea, which result in high health costs to individuals and communities, said Moses Mumba, a programme officer for WaterAid, a British-based charity.

“It makes them to contribute less to their economic well-being and, therefore, they remain poor,” he said.

Zambia has signed up to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and is attempting to halve the number of people without access to safe water by 2015.

WaterAid is sinking boreholes for impoverished communities in northern Zambia’s Luapula Province.

Analysts concede that the country has made inroads to providing greater access to safe water as part of its MDG, but the provision of adequate sanitation has been largely unaddressed.

A 2005 study, The Cost of Meeting the MDGs in Zambia, by University of Zambia economics lecturer Chrispin Mphuka, noted that in the decade leading up to 2000, the proportion of households with safe drinking water had increased by three percent to 51 percent, but the number of households with access to improved sanitation had declined by two percent to 15 percent in the same period,.

Urban areas have relatively good access to potable water, unlike rural areas, where thousands of communities rely on river courses and shallow wells for water, and only a few households have pit latrines.

Theresa Bwalya, a housewife in Samfya district, Luapula Province, told IRIN: “We were all drinking water from the river because there is no tap water here until last year [2008, when WaterAid sank the only borehole in the area]. Now, all of us are competing to draw from here. No one wants to draw [water] from the river anymore.

“There are not many people with toilets and bathing shelters; sometimes we use the river to answer the ‘call of nature’ [defecate], and to wash clothes. Diarrhoea and stomach pains are very common in this area.”

Luapula Province has several rivers and at least two lakes within its boundaries, but the government’s Central Statistical Office (CSO) rates the province as having the lowest coverage in terms of safe water (18.8 percent) and sanitation (2.3 percent). The last census, in 2000, listed four of its seven districts among the top 10 with the worst access to both water and sanitation nationwide.

Broken infrastructure

At national level, the CSO estimated that 59 percent of urban households had access to safe water, while only 43 percent of the rural population could access clean water.

About 59 percent of households in Zambia have a pit latrine, while 7.3 percent use communal latrines, and a further 4.6 percent used their neighbour’s latrine.

According to Alfred Nyambose, a provincial local government officer in Luapula, “The biggest problem we have is that in almost every peri-urban set-up, the system [infrastructure] is broken; the system is simply non-existent.”

It is not a question of disregarding the rural voter, but rather a case of dividing the meagre resources appropriately among the many competing needs

In 2007 the Zambian government launched the National Water and Sanitation Policy in an attempt to increase access to safe drinking water and improve sanitation facilities, but critics say the policy does address the needs of those living in rural areas. “It is not a question of disregarding the rural voter, but rather a case of dividing the meagre resources appropriately among the many competing needs [of the country],” Nyambose said.

“The problem we have been having in this province is not lack of access to water, but it is lack of access to safe, clean drinking water, because water here is everywhere and it can be collected from any point. The question is: is that water fit for human consumption? And the answer is �no.”

Since 1994, WaterAid has helped about 400,000 people access safe drinking water and proper sanitation by sinking boreholes fitted with hand-pumps, and encouraging communities in rural and peri-urban areas to build latrines and bathing shelters and dig waste pits.

In Luapula Province, the organisation has so far funded the construction of some 205 water points and 4,577 improved latrines. “With access to safe water, adequate sanitation and good hygiene practices,” Mumba said, “people’s opportunities for engaging in productive activities will be increased, thereby improving their socio-economic welfare and taking them out of poverty.”

nm/go/he source.www.irinnews.org

Photo: SCDO

Droughts, dwindling food supplies, disrupted agricutural seasons- what is a legislator to do? (file photo)

DAKAR,� – Some of the 50 parliamentarians from across West Africa attending a conference on climate change, and food and water security held in Dakar on 25 and 26 March, looked uncomfortable when presented with a picture of a banana with a watermelon-coloured peel and an elephant with a cabbage head. This is what you think genetically modified organisms (GMO) look like, right? asked the plant breeding expert, Marcel Galiba. I want you to reconsider, he challenged the lawmakers.

As part of a two-day meeting funded by the governments of Norway and Sweden that opened on 25 March, the international non-profit, European Parliamentarians for Africa (AWEPA), is conducting the last of six regional meetings across Africa to increase lawmakers’ awareness about tackling climate change and food security issues in their parliaments.

We want them to take this information back to their parliaments and lobby for urgently needed action, AWEPA’s Secretary General,� Granstedt, told IRIN. They are agents of change who are not talking to one another in their own parliaments, neighbouring ones, or with us from Europe. He added the regional meetings are also to help African lawmakers create a negotiating strategy for the climate change conference scheduled to take place in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

Rusted plows

Plant expert Galiba, Mali’s director for the Japanese NGO, Sasakawa Global 2000 – who said his provocative slides on GMO are intended to spark debate – told IRIN governments generally are loathe to adopt new technology.

It is understandable because there are rusted plows lying by relics of failed agricultural revolutions still fresh in their memories, said the plant scientist. The technology exists for farmers to work year-round rather than three months [during rainy season], but governments are afraid to adopt it.

The lawmakers- mostly from Senegal, Mali, C�te d�Ivoire and Benin, and a small number from Europe � listened to presentations from the UN World Food Programme (WFP), Senegal’s Ministry of Agriculture on its recent reforms, and non-profits Global Water Partnership and Wateraid West Africa.

Senegalese legislator Seydou Diouf told IRIN the challenge is to take technical knowledge back to his government and translate it into legislation on climate change. This is where the work begins. This meeting is needed, though. We are not in the business, nor have the time to become experts.

AWEPA’s Granstedt told the lawmakers that sub-Saharan Africa faces the harshest consequences of climate change though rich countries are largely responsible. Yes, we created the problem. And we need to work with one another to get out of this mess.

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Photo: Anna Jefferys/IRIN

Sidiki Mansark shows IRIN the Water Sie Boys public shower

FREETOWN,� – Mansark lives and works in Kroo bay slum, in the centre of the capital Freetown, home to 13,000 people, which has two working public water taps. Kroo Bay is littered with rubbish and sewage many people use the rubbish to reclaim land on which to build ramshackle houses.

There are no pit latrines in the slum; most residents use the beach or one of the few drop toilets constructed on it. On discovering a natural spring in the slum, Mansark decided to set up a cooperative, the Water Sie Boys, to�run a public shower for slum-dwellers.

Here are our two taps. Every day women line up to get water to wash with. They have to lug it far away and there is no privacy for bathing.

We discovered a spring some years ago and we thought people would use a shower. The spring gives pure water. We saw the people lacking, and we decided to do something about it.

We used to have a machine to pump water into our containers, but it has been broken for months now, so now we fill up the tanks by hand.

We are straining, but we are so happy to be helping our community.

If you want a shower, you pay 3 US cents (100 Leones) and you can take five minutes, or we will give you a bucket of water. People need soap so we started to make it [soap] too.

Photo: Anna Jefferys/IRIN

We are 20 working here but I want to increase the number. We get by� every now and then we have to put in $1.50 to sustain our business. We want to expand it to other zones in the slum. We could employ 40 people because we always have enough customers.

We don’t have roofing materials and we don’t have money to plaster our showers. The women’s shower is the worst – it is mouldy – but it is not their fault. None of us are trained. I did not know anything about plumbing but now I have learned. There is one plumber in the slum who helps us.

“Now everyone comes to us when they want a shower. We are not rich but water is life, and we want to bring it to the people.

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source.www.irinnews.org