In Malawi, it is not uncommon to see women and children walking long distances to fetch water for their families.
These long walks often lead to overwhelmed hand-pumped boreholes that frequently run dry, lengthening the wait to bring a bucketful home.
The government wants an end to the long search for water that mostly deprives women of the time, energy and peace of mind to care for their families, crops, livestock, businesses and public life.
At Capital Hill, policymakers are talking about a switch from rampant boreholes fitted with hand pumps to high-yielding solar-powered piped water supply systems.
In their minds, they visualise decentralised pipes taking water closer to the country’s rural majority.
“No one should travel over 500 metres to access clean water and take it home,” says Secretary for Water Elias Chimulambe. “Each tap should serve a maximum of 150 people, not 250 as is the case with hand-pumped boreholes.”
As part of the policy shift, government and its partners have pledged 193 piped water supply systems by 2028, representing one per constituency.
There are 29 piped water systems in Nsanje District at the southern tip of the country, with four of them run by water users associations (WUA).
However, people at the receiving end of a pipeline from Marka Primary School, the country’s southernmost localised solar-powered piped water system, say bringing water closer to their homes has stimulated demand for home-based connections.
“Piping water closer to our homes has made life simple as we no longer walk long distances with filled buckets on our heads. In fact, over 100 people have approached us to ask if we could pipe the water directly into their homes. They are willing to pay for the connections and convenience of the new approach,” says Marka Water Point Committee chairperson Milika Bode.
However, expanding the pipeline to interested families seems to be no mean task for the village-based water suppliers struggling to repair the systems, mostly supplying water from schools, hospitals and other public facilities.
Malawi’s urban population is mostly supplied by five water boards. Lilongwe and Blantyre water boards supply their populous cities, leaving the suburban population to their regional counterparts in the North, Central and South.
However, the rural communities—home to 84 percent of the population, according to the 2018 census—predominantly source water from hand-pumped boreholes, with the coveted piped systems here and there. Here, the WUAs are to the rural population what water boards are to their urban counterpart.
For the rural majority, piping water to their homes constitutes a big leap they could only covet since Malawi won independence from British colonial rule in 1964.
For the lost decades, gushing taps were a symbol of status and prestige reserved for the urban few.
“It’s exciting that government has heard our cry by rolling out piped water systems to rural areas,” says Bode. “The hand pumps, often located far from where we live, reduced us to second-class citizens while our urban colleagues enjoyed safe water piped straight into their homes and backyards,” says Bode, drawing water from a system near her home in Marka.
However, piping water to rural homesteads will not be easy or cheap as most of the new systems stop at just bringing water closer to where people live, not straight into homes and businesses of people who can afford it.
The policy shift seeks to ensure a return trip to the nearest water point does not span over 30 minutes.
Chimulambe says government plans to drill high-yielding boreholes with solar-powered pumps to pipe water to surrounding homesteads, businesses and public facilities.
In his words, motorised and solar-powered pumps that abstract seven to 25 litres of groundwater per second will give interested households the ease to connect to the piped water system at a fee.
He explains: “We are exploring several ways to achieve this. The smaller ones will be managed by private entrepreneurs while the bigger ones like Lirangwe Solar Powered Water Supply Scheme will be run by WUAs linked to regional water boards through Water Users Associations. This is because the new systems are sophisticated and cannot be adequately managed by local committees that have been struggling to manage and repair ordinary hand-pumped boreholes.”
Lirangwe Solar-Powered Water Supply System, funded by the World Bank through the Malawi Resilience and Disaster Risk Management Project , has weaned the semi-arid community and businesses in the rural trading centre, located 30km from Blantyre City, wave goodbye to erratic water supply.
Elesi Khembo, who runs a restaurant at Lirangwe Market says intermittent water supply was a huge problem, especially during the dry season when taps frequently dried for up to 12 hours.
“Water is almost everything to my food business. Any hiccups affect sanitation and hygiene, putting off customers scared of the potential preventable diseases from contaminated food, plates and cups.”
The situation has improved since the switch from pumps powered by on-off hydropower to the new ones powered by two solar farms.
“With the new system, water problems are gone. Taps no longer stutter due to frequent blackouts. Since we switched on the solar-powered pumps, we have water day and night. After all, the area enjoys abundant sunshine,” says Alice Mpewe, from Lirangwe WUA.
