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Examples of our work in Tanzania


The need for safe water

The dried up earth dam between the villages of Ndaleta and Njora
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

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.

 

Tanzania
Tanzania Map
Area: 945,090km²
Capital: Dodoma
Other main cities:
Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Mwanza, Tabora
  • Population
    Population icon36.9m
  • Infant mortality
    Infant mortality icon165/1000
  • Life expectancy
    Life expectancy icon45.9 years
  • Water supply coverage
    Water supply coverage icon62%
  • Sanitation coverage
    Sanitation coverage icon47%
  • Below poverty line
    Below poverty line icon35.7%
  • Development index
    Development index icon162
  • Adult literacy
    Adult literacy icon69%
Sources:
Human Development Report 2006, World Development Report 2006
NB. Official statistics tend to understate the extent of water and sanitation problems, sometimes by a large factor. There are not sufficient resources available for accurate monitoring of either population or coverage. Varying definitions of water and sanitation coverage are used and national figures mask large regional differences in coverage.
 

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