The best Christmas present ever—safe water for thousands!!!

Despite being 9 months on from the deadly cyclone that ripped through our area earlier in the year, people are still struggling with loss and shortages. Many lives were lost here, along with houses, crops, fields, food, sanitation & safe water supply.

So we’ve been helping with all these issues at grassroots level, but one of the most important is repairing borehole pumps.  

We chose 6 more “dead”, or poorly-working pumps, formed pump committees, trained in the importance of proper maintenance, and contracted with users to begin to pay small monthly tariffs to meet future repair costs.

All 6 pumps were repaired in time for Christmas.  Despite the forex and kwacha devaluation challenges, we managed to locate the right parts and complete the project, so thousands of villagers celebrated the season without the constant stress of water collection!

Each pump and area has its own story, but this work was life-transforming for whole villages: over 700 user households benefitted—about 3,900 people now have safe water close-by, especially appreciated by the particularly vulnerable, elderly, sick and frail

Village Chiefs, water & development committees, even the local MP, expressed thanks for the work done. Repairing any pump, empowers the women to spend more time within their households. It helps them get their children to school, enables them to tend their fields and produce food, hopefully with surplus to sell, stirring the local economy.

This intervention of borehole pump repair brings help to what is still in many places, a disaster-torn community.   But safe water, now locally available, brings smiles of gratitude—and hope for more stable development in 2024!

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Above, the misery of a broken borehole pump….

Below—some of the pumps successfully repaired. The first pic is the pump featured above, after restoration and including a new concrete apron to improve hygiene, raised to mitigate the effects of future flooding. This intervention saved most women having to walk about 1 km to another village, many times a day, but those unable to manage that were having to draw water from a murky hand-dug shallow well of potentially polluted water.