BigThink

Posted by Sarah Whitney and Claire Bristow, Global Development Fellows

This week, builders laid the concrete slab at the community centre. This marks great progress as the foundation is complete and means that the walls will quickly start to get higher and higher. Finishing the slab required a lot of materials and labour in the hot sun, providing both the Project Steering Committee and the builders with challenges–especially in regards to water.

At the community centre site sits a 5,000 liter water tank, which the Project Steering Committee has borrowed from the family of Uta’s headman. This has provided a supply of water to the construction site in the most efficient way possible in a village with no access to running water. When the communal taps near the community centre are working–for a day or two once a month–the water tank can be filled from a hose by members of the Project Steering Committee. However, construction of the centre takes much more water than these unreliable taps can provide, especially during the recent construction of the slab. The solution, for both the centre and families who can afford to pay for water, is to have a community member with a tractor or a pick-up truck drive to a nearby dam or working tap in another village with thirty or forty 20 liter containers and fill up water to deliver. This is unfortunately both expensive and inefficient, but it is the solution for now.

For some families, having clean water delivered to their homes is just not affordable. Girls are often seen before and after school and women in the hot afternoon sun pushing wheelbarrows to the dry river to dig for water or to a temporarily working tap across the village to fill up their water containers. This may or may not be safe for drinking, and almost always families live on an insufficient amount of water.

The local government is generally unresponsive to the lack of access to water. Living here for eight months, we have seen a municipality truck deliver water to select families in the community only two or three times. The ward councellor, the representative of the Bushbuckridge Municipality for this area, has guaranteed that there will be a permanent solution to the water crisis by 2012–a large dam is being built in the region with pipelines to connect water to hundreds of communities in the area currently without it. Not only does this mean at least two more years without access to water in Uta, but there is little trust among the community that this promise will be fulfilled. Short-term solutions in the area include the digging of boreholes and the repair of existing water engines and pipelines, but neither are easy tasks. This is a dry area, limiting natural water access due to insufficient rains and a lack of underground water supplies. Thus, the water crisis is both a result of current government mismanagement and a lasting effect of apartheid’s land distribution systems.

For the community centre, lack of access to reliable water means higher costs and temporary construction delays when none is available. We will be working with the Project Steering Committee to develop solutions for water at the centre–likely meaning the construction of a borehole in the future. For the community, the country, and the region, the water crisis means so much more. Almost one-fifth of the world’s population lives in areas of physical water scarcity. Almost a quarter faces economic water shortages, in which countries lack the infrastructure necessary to carry water from rivers and aquifers. That is 1.6 billion people living without sufficient access to water. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most water-stressed countries of any region. Clean water is a foundation of human health, and too many struggle to survive without it. The community centre will be a resource in Uta, eventually housing a source of community water and serving as a place where community members can meet to speak with their local leaders and elected officials, demanding the access to water they deserve.

Shangaan word of the day: mati – water