Reaching the poor

The distribution of waterpoints is unevenly spread in countries like Malawi.

Credit: WaterAid / Alixandra Fenton

Kate Watson explains how satellite technology is helping WaterAid to investigate how everyone in Malawi can gain equal access to water.

A disenchanted villager once asked "Why does the next village have eight handpumps and we don't have any?" This was a good question and one that was difficult to answer.

In a truly fair and well managed society there should be no difference in the levels of access to safe water between communities in an area.

Yet in the Salima District of Malawi, WaterAid has found that in some communities there are handpumps every 250 metres while in others people had to travel several kilometres to the nearest waterpoint. Is this a result of an unfortunate oversight made by the planners, or is this in fact the norm for the district?

WaterAid has set about trying to discover the root cause of this problem, and has carried out a survey to establish the age, provider, location and condition of every improved community water point in the rural areas of the Salima District.

By using hand-held global positioning systems (GPS) the teams were able to pinpoint the exact location of the water points. Then, by using this information along with details of the population WaterAid was, for the first time, able to work out the equity of distribution of water points. The survey results were then entered on a database and global information system (GIS) technology was used to develop maps of the information.

The evidence from the survey suggests that the way resources have been distributed in the past has been unfair - the unserved have repeatedly been ignored and the relatively well served continually given additional water facilities. In addition the technologies used in projects have often been inappropriate and more complicated than necessary.

Following its initial findings in Salima, WaterAid and other organisations continued the survey work and developed a water point inventory containing detailed information on over 9000 water points in regions across the country.

The work covers a population of 1.5 million people, nearly 18% of the rural population of Malawi. This information is enabling those involved in the Malawian water sector to make an accurate assessment of what needs to be done to reach the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015.

For example, WaterAid's calculations show that on the basis of current spending it will take the government 32 years to provide basic water services to everyone in the Salima District. But, by using the new mapping technique to determine who should be targeted, and by reaching those most in need with the most appropriate technology, this could theoretically be achieved in five years.

However, there needs to be much greater coordination and planning for this to happen. Therefore, WaterAid's next step in Malawi is to develop the capacity of the Ministry of Water Development to manage the ongoing survey work and coordinate the water and sanitation work of all organisations in the country to ensure that resources are allocated fairly to reach those most in need.

Meanwhile, this new approach is being taken up by WaterAid and other organisations around the world so that they too can build accurate maps to plan how to reach the MDGs, enabling more of the world's poor to gain access to these basic needs in an equitable way.