The road out of poverty

The Financial Times' East Africa correspondent, Barney Jopson, travelled with WaterAid to Ethiopia to visit a community literally building their own path out of poverty...

Digging into the hillside in Ethiopia.

Credit: FT / Barney Jopson

The men, women and children disfiguring the hillside near Terate in Konso, southern Ethiopia, are not a typical African road gang. The road they are building is for themselves.

It currently leads to a dead-end. But by the end of the year the people hope it will take them, via a new well, out of water poverty.

With swathes of east Africa devastated by drought, climate change looms ever larger in WaterAid's work.

Africa is widely seen as the continent most vulnerable to climate change, least responsible for causing it, and least able to afford the costs of managing it. In Ethiopia's impoverished Konso district people say it is already making life more precarious.

The evidence is anecdotal rather than scientific. But adults in Terate remember heavy downpours two or three times a day during the rainy season when they were children. In the years since, the weather has become more erratic and droughts more frequent, making water increasingly scarce.

So when WaterAid said it had found a promising site for a well deep inside Konso’s concertina of hills, but that there was no way of getting the drilling machinery to it, the villagers said that was not a problem. They would build an access road themselves.

"Our water resources are very small," says Kumeta Kuto, chief of the local 'kebele', or ward. "Our women have to walk to collect water from the rivers. In the rainy season it can take them five hours. In the dry season it can take 24 hours."

Pinning down causal links between local weather events and greenhouse gas emissions remains difficult. More than 13 million Ethiopians need food aid, and hunger in Konso is widespread because the spring harvest has been poor in the past two years due to low rainfall.

But shortages of clean water can be just as devastating to human health because they let dangerous pathogens spread across homes, food and fingers.

If WaterAid finds a little water at the end of the new road near Terate it will set up a hand pump. If it finds a lot it will build a generator-powered distribution system to pipe it to the village.

That should transform the health of its people – and liberate its women from the drudgery of water collection.

• Article reproduced by kind permission of The Financial Times – the full version appeared in their pages on November 17 2009.
  
• WaterAid has worked in Ethiopia since 1983 and in 2009 we helped 71,000 people to gain access to safe water and 65,000 to sanitation.
  
• Only 42% of the population have access to safe water and only 11% have anywhere to go to the toilet. As a result, over 73,000 children die every single year from diarrhoeal diseases.
  
• Find out more at www.wateraid.org/ethiopia.