Some of the remote vil­lages that are hard to reach are often the last to receive basic ser­vices such as san­i­ta­tion or clean water. A story in All Africa today pro­files one such vil­lage in Mozam­bique that has been drink­ing from a river for gen­er­a­tions. The ques­tion is, why has this gone on for so long?

From this IPS story that we found at All Africa, writer Jessie Boy­lan asks some water NGOs why this goes on so long.

Wat­erAid is an inter­na­tional NGO that works with com­mu­ni­ties to insall wells, water pumps, and com­post­ing latrines. They have a range of basic hand pumps which are cheap enough for com­mu­ni­ties to afford, and quick and easy to fix.

The NGO claims to have helped 270,000 peo­ple gain access to water across Mozam­bique, and has been work­ing in Niassa Province since 1995.

There are sev­eral fac­tors which con­tribute to water, hygiene and san­i­ta­tion prob­lems in the province, says Heike Gloeck­ner, WaterAid’s South­ern Africa regional pro­gramme officer.

“Broadly I would say that the issues we are fac­ing are: water tables are decreas­ing, pop­u­la­tion is increas­ing (in some areas) and topog­ra­phy is mak­ing it very hard for our part­ners to access the aquifer for drilling a bore­hole,” she says.

WaterAid’s tech­ni­cal sup­port man­ager, Erik Har­vey, says the sink­ing water table means com­mu­ni­ties are forced to rely on out­side sup­port to reach deeper more reli­able water reserves.

“Most com­mu­ni­ties have exist­ing sur­vival strate­gies that can sim­ply be rein­forced. Most have basic wells that, with very lit­tle effort, can be pro­tected, (lined with bricks, raised above ground level, closed with a lid, used with a sin­gle bucket and rope as opposed to many),” he adds.

“In the absence of this, basic fil­ters can be made with lay­ered cloth, or drink­ing water, par­tic­u­larly for babies, elderly and the ill, can be boiled.”

When asked why no one has yet reached vil­lages like Mcon­dece, Mtepwe and Mag­a­chi, Har­vey responded, “The process of pri­ori­ti­sa­tion and com­mu­nity selec­tion is nor­mally under­taken by the gov­ern­ment with some assis­tance from Wat­erAid staff.

“WaterAid’s fund­ing is lim­ited,” says Har­vey, “and we have, where pos­si­ble, focused on choos­ing dis­tricts that have his­tor­i­cally had the low­est cov­er­age levels.

“The key here is to get gov­ern­ment to take up our learn­ing, to com­bine the efforts of all role-players and funds in the sec­tor to reach the unreached vil­lages. Wat­erAid alone just does not have the resources to reach everywhere.”

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