Rugged road to development

It is 4.30 am and 20-year-old Nixon Zimba gets up to start his day. As time hits 5am, Zimba, a resident of Area 36 in Lilongwe, heads to join a queue that has formed outside a communal bathroom in his compound.

The queue extends all the way to the steps outside the living rooms.

Residents, both male and female, queue for long periods to access a dilapidated bathroom. There are seven families living in the compound.

While in the queue, Zimba painfully bears the stink from a pit latrine that stand directly opposite the bathroom. The pit latrine is nearly full, but the landlord does not seem to care to dig a new one.

“Sanitary facilities here are in very bad shape. I don’t even know if the landlord cares about good sanitation and hygiene among us tenants,” complains Zimba, glancing around at about nine other tenants queuing to buy water from a kiosk a few metres away.

Access to clean and affordable drinking water is another problem Zimba and other residents in high density urban areas are grappling with.

“I wish government could construct decent but affordable houses to cater for low-income earners like us. Otherwise, we risk dying of cholera and other waterborne diseases here,” he complains.

A snap survey carried out last year by Pump Aid Malawi in seven traditional authorities (T/As) in Kasungu revealed that Malawi continues to register a drop in access to safe and affordable drinking water because of non-functioning water systems.

The revelation has raised fears that Malawi may not be able to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number six if no solutions are found to this problem.

The goal compels governments to ensure that they achieve universal access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030.

The development is also a blow to the National Water Development Programme II, which seeks government’s commitment to improve water supply and sanitation services to low-income communities in the country.

The organisation’s acting country director, Tiyese Zumu-Mwale, says although there is 84 percent coverage for safe water systems, including piped water systems and boreholes fitted with hand pumps, only 54 percent of Malawians are enjoying their right to safe and clean drinking water.

Zumu-Mwale says this is largely due to the fact that almost 30 percent of these facilities broke down and have remained unrepaired.

He says: “The other challenge is lack of resources among beneficiary communities to rehabilitate the broken-down boreholes. This has tended to force communities to revert to drawing their water from the same unprotected sources they used to rely on before the coming of the borehole.”

Zumu-Mwale says life is particularly unbearable for rural folks, particularly women and children who walk long distances to draw water from the nearest wells, streams and rivers.

He says this has in turn led to the compromise in sanitation and hygiene in homes and public institutions such as schools, health centres and markets, among others.

“The majority of water bodies [in the country] are polluted, which makes it difficult for communities to fight against waterborne diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and dysentery. Lack of potable water and sanitary facilities also negatively impacts on education as menstruating girls can hardly attend classes in that situation,” he explains.

United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) water, sanitation and hygiene (Wash) specialist Jonathan Hunter says lack of water and basic sanitation in schools tends to be particularly detrimental to girls, especially those who have reached puberty, while leaving others at risk of Wash-related diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and dysentery.

Hunter also says many girls do not attend school during menstruation when clean and separate latrines for girls are not available.

“Their absenteeism often leads to poor school performance and high dropout rates. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 50 percent of all girls drop out of primary school because of insufficient access to safe water and inadequate sanitation facilities,” he explains.

Associate professor Golden Msilimba, who is director of the Centre of Excellence in Water and Sanitation at Mzuzu University (Mzuni), believes Malawi needs to embrace cheap interventions to address problems of lack of access to safe potable water.

Msilimba recommends that such interventions should target the poor; particularly those in peri-urban and rural areas.

Zumu-Mwale says his organisation has already started implementing some of the proposed interventions in Kasungu and Mchinji.

He emphasises the need for government and its development partners to explore other ways of ensuring that water systems that are already in place should be sustainable and that the 16 percent gap can be achieved.

He cites approaches such as the self-supply approach that Pump Aid is piloting in Kasungu with funding from Unicef.

Under the approach, individuals and smaller families from hard-to-reach areas are accessing low-cost technology pumps such as rope and washer pumps.

Zumu-Mwale challenges that it will be difficult for Malawi to meet SDG 6 if government does not embrace these technologies and include them in its policies.