Broken pumps, dashed hopes

Mozambique

The people of the bush want protected wells to quench thirst and fight disease.

Rory Carroll reports from Kwilazia

Pale and weak, Aliseni Kimo shivered under a blanket in his straw and bamboo hut, stricken with diarrhoea for four consecutive days after drinking from a swamp near his village of Kwilazia. On the way to the swamp the 70-year-old maize farmer had passed a water pump. Through his exhaustion he contrived a smile: "Doesn't work, hasn't worked in ages."

Dust and sand coated the pump which was ignored by other villagers as they tramped to the same pool from which Mr Kimo drank.

Fatima Kwanda, 40, peered into the murk before scooping some water with an orange plastic container for that evening's cooking and washing. Hopefully the contamination was gone, she said.

Such is the reality of unsustainable development. Niassa province in north-eastern Mozambique emerged from colonial neglect and civil war 10 years ago as a wilderness of scrub so barren that it was described as the Siberia of Mozambique.

There would be no recovery without clean water, so boreholes were drilled and pumps installed. Yet one by one villages have seen the devices break and stay broken. Precisely the sort of failure which the Johannesburg development summit said should not be repeated.

The good news is that in Niassa lessons have been learned and strategies refined. The bad news is that because of vested interests and a reluctance to admit mistakes not everybody wants to implement them.

An ostensibly technical issue about two types of technology, handpumps and protected wells, has become a test case for the Johannesburg rhetoric of sustainability.

Handpumps can be simple, cheap and effective ways to tap underground water, which in Mozambique are installed for under £2,600. In theory, just one pump can service an entire village for 14 years. But because of shoddy installation, pumps have been known to fail within days. Wear and tear and breakages are inevitable but the authorities and aid agencies like to move on to new projects and leave repairs to the community.

In Niassa, many communities are too poor and disorganised to replace parts such as foot valves and washers. But they can replace snapped ropes and punctured buckets, meaning that wells are sustainable.

For Ned Breslin, head of WaterAid in Mozambique, the key is to educate communities about the technologies and to let them make an informed choice about the most apt.

"The closer you get to towns the more sustainable are handpumps, people have more money and have an easier time finding spare parts. In rural areas that's not the case."

A traditional well can be an open hole carved from a swamp into which rains wash human and animal faeces, as happened to the water drunk by Mr Kimo.

A protected well is lined to block pathogens and closed with a metal cover and padlock. The bucket is stored inside and a windlass stops it touching the ground, cutting the risk of contamination.

Wells are more vulnerable to contamination than pumps but aid specialist Sally Sutton's study of 2,000 water sources in Zambia showed that basic improvements to wells can dramatically improve water quality and all but eradicate cholera and diarrhoea. At £640, a protected well is barely a quarter the price of a pump.

Asked to choose a technology and pay 2%-10% of the cost, most communities in Niassa have chosen wells and asked for broken pumps to be removed, including the village of Kwilazia, which should have a new well by Christmas. The result is clean, sustainable water and less disease.

The strategy is so sensible as to be obvious but field workers have struggled to get it accepted. Profits, pride and prejudice are threatened.

By their own admission, pump manufacturers have lobbied national, provincial and district authorities to keep buying pumps. In any case, the more sophisticated technology makes the authorities feel progressive and modern.

Aid agencies and donors have also hesitated. "A huge problem for donors is to allow rural people to make decisions because they think rural people are stupid," said Mr Breslin.

The reluctance of aid agencies to revisit projects and learn from failure has perpetuated unsustainable strategies such as the pumps, he added. The Japanese, for example, are spending £8.34m on 148 pumps in Mozambique which few expect to last more than a couple of years.

In a series of reports, Mr Breslin has advocated a policy unpopular with many colleagues and fundraisers: take responsibility for failure, learn from it, spend existing money better rather than demand more.

"Let's use what we have in a better way instead of hindering community choices because 'we' know what is better for 'them', and moving on to the next contract, the next job, the next funding round, without a real understanding of what happened where we were working before."