Examples of our work in Tanzania

The need for safe water

In the dry season water can become desperately hard to find. Women even search under the baked earth of a dried up river bed.

Credit: WaterAid / Jim Holmers

Mariam Hassan lives in the village of Ndalata in the Kiteto District. She has four children, all girls, aged nine, seven, four and two. Her family suffers from blood diarrhoea and one of her children has bad eye problems.

Mariam knows that they get diarrhoea because they collect water from any place they can find it. Sometimes they have to dig into a dried up riverbed to find pools of water and during the dry season they share their water with cattle and wild animals.

"We have to drink it. We know that it is not OK but there is no choice." she says. 

WaterAid's partner organisation Kinnapa is planning to install a deep borehole and pump engine in Ndalata to benefit the community of 1,000 people.

Handpump maintenance

Vincent and Lazaro are the caretakers of the Afridev handpump in Chessa village.

Credit: WaterAid / Jim Holmes

WaterAid's partner the Anglican Church of Tabora has helped the community of Chessa village in the Tabora District construct a 24 metre deep well, fitted with an Afridev handpump, which serves the 15 homesteads with safe water.

A key principle of WaterAid projects is that communities take ownership of projects and are responsible for their upkeep. Brothers Vincent and Lazaro William volunteered to be the pump caretakers; they received a week's maintenance training and a toolkit consisting of a spanner, wrench and rods from Kinnapa.

They take the pump apart once a year to check the whole system, and fix whatever problems they can. If there are difficult problems they cannot solve, as happened once when the water dried up, a specialist technician can come from the Anglican Church of Tabora to help mend the pump.