Malawians second chance

Malawi

Once it was an example for all Africa. Then its water system fell into disrepair

Rory Carroll in Chilonga

Shovels and pipes spilled from the trucks and workers cracked open the red earth. Twelve miles separated the village of Chilonga from the source of water in the mountains, but work was completed within two months, thanks to villagers who were trained and mobilised to help.

Steel taps gleamed in the sun and produced clean water at the slightest twist.

Malawi's rural water projects were an example for Africa. It was hailed as a leap into a new era. It was 1984.

On a hot, still afternoon 18 years later Saizan Kwanda, one of the villagers who helped the engineers in 1984, rested a foot on a metal pipe jutting from his maize field. It was around 20cm long, rusty, warped, and all that was left of Chilonga's new era.

"The grandchildren don't believe us when we say we had water brought to us from under the ground," said Mr Kwanda, 85. The villagers are back with their ancestors: down by the Shire River, scooping contaminated water into buckets and using it to drink, cook and bathe.

But now, new trucks are bringing a new strategy, and the promise of clean water which will not stop flowing.

From the mid 70s, gravity-fed water systems began to be built as part of a race for development in Malawi.

Mountain water collected in weirs was filtered, tanked and piped to the taps. Diseases such as cholera claimed fewer victims, and women were spared daily trudges to crocodile-infested rivers.

Under the autocratic rule of President Hastings Banda, officials and communities were ordered to keep the system running, and they usually managed to obey.

But when Banda fell in 1994, his democratically elected successors gave communities the responsibility for managing their own supplies.

With no dictator to compel volunteers and no cash to pay professionals, villages such as Chilonga watched helplessly as one tap after another dried up. Screws loosened, washers eroded and tanks blocked. By 2000, around 40% of the taps in the area were dry and the rest close to collapse. "What could we do?" said Saizan Kwanda.

Quite a lot, in fact, as the past year has shown. The people of the surrounding Machinga district have learned to organise, raise money and solve problems to the extent that 90% of the taps are now working and the rest are expected to be rehabilitated soon.

It took an external agent, the charity WaterAid, to prod the communities towards empowerment. In partnership with a private Malawi contractor, it recommended that each tap have its own committee, typically three people, to collect pennies from each household to fund repairs, and that a main committee handle bigger tasks.

Transactions are recorded in copybooks and receipts are available for scrutiny to build trust and transparency - scarce resources in a country shunned by some aid agencies because of corruption.

For drought-stricken farmers alien to such activism, these seemingly small steps are a dramatic departure, and not all are convinced: the rusty pipe in Chilonga showed it was one of the villages yet to organise.

Community leaders like Royce Kanyumwa, flown to Ethiopia by WaterAid to witness similar schemes, have returned with evangelical fervour. "We learned we can stand on our own feet. We can run things on our own. It's a matter of time."