The missing keys: education and leadership

“Malawi doesn’t have a water problem; it has a hydrogeologist problem” says Owen Scott, a long term staff for EWB in Malawi on a blog post dated from May 2010.

According to him, there is a lot of bad siting in Malawi and a lot of bad hydrogeological practice. This post identifies the general practice currently undertaken and the main issues associated to such practice. It also provides some reflections and avenues on how to improve the hydrogeological practice in Malawi and how such new practices would be helpful to improve the access to safe water.

Here's a story

“Yesterday I was reading a report about water access in one of Malawi’s lakeside districts. The district has a major hydreogeological split – close to the lake it has a shallow water table, further from the lake it has a deeper water table. This means that close to the lake you can use hand-drilled boreholes and shallow wells, while further from the lake you need to drill boreholes with a rig.

The report examined a GPS survey of the waterpoints in the district, and found that despite the shallow aquifer close to the lake, many organizations were still using drilling rigs to drill boreholes, each at over twice the cost of hand-drilled boreholes, and over six times the cost of hand-dug shallow wells.”- Scott, 2010.

Current practice and main issues

•  lack of technically qualified professionals to manage and make informed decisions in the water sector;
•  lack of good data from past work due to the lack of communication between the different NonGovernmental Organisations (NGOs) and the government of Malawi leading to poor siting of the newly installed borehole;
• most boreholes are drilled using a drill rig regardless of the depth when some location could be hand dig, leading to an important loss of money;
• a lot of the boreholes are drilled dry, run dry, have an insufficient yield and/or a low recharge rate, making them useless;
• recurring hydrogeological challenges (like salinity in the water); and,
• the donors and NGOs are more focused on funding “basic needs” like a program drilling wells instead of  program providing university scholarships or teachers in Malawi, or to a lesser extent, a good and strong training of the decision makers.

What could help improving the efficiency and sustainability?

By having more informed, up to date and educated professional leading and managing the water sector in Malawi, the decision making and planning would be significantly improved. This could empower the government (either at the National, Regional and/or District level) to better regulate and help the NGOs to do more sustainable and better planned work.

If appropriate technologies were used for each section of the water table (drilling vs digging), than the cost of bringing water access in the district up to government standards could be halved and the money saved could be used for training, maintenance or more waterpoints.

The supply aquifers are mostly low yielding, discontinuous and heterogeneous and the cost of exploration tend to be high relative to the return.  Therefore sharing the data and reports could lead to saving precious time and money when planning borehole/hand dug well siting, but for this to happen, the district water officer need to be able to analyze and understand the data to make better informed decisions.

Conclusion

On paper, many of these recommendations are already in place. NGOs are already supposed to go through the district. Boreholes are supposed to be drilled, subjected to a pump-test, and then re-drilled if they fail the test. Hydreogeological information, is supposed to be collected after each drilling, reported to the governmentt, and then added to a database.

The problem is that very little of this happens. Water offices are understaffed and underresourced, can't always do drilling or pump-test supervision, and also most of the time don't always know how to do it even if they have the resources. Contractors, like anywhere, are always trying to cut corners and get away with the minimum standard of work they can....and they get away with a lot in Malawi.

The hydrogeological and geological work done concerns almost wholly the well siting. There is little to no time available or budgeted to observe and supervise drilling, correlate the logs recorded by the field staff with the predicted sequence, analyse, interpret and use the data recorded or carry out more hydrogeological assessments.

If the planning and managing of the waterpoints would be more efficient, a lot more work could be done with the time and money saved.  

There is certainly hope, but the questions that remain are not different than before: are people in the field sufficiently well trained and knowledgeable to record and report the data properly? Are the decisions taken in the field approved by someone with sufficient understanding? Are the data analysed and interpreted properly and are they use to modify the drilling program and decisions? Until the answer to these questions is yes, the water sector in Malawi will remain unstable and inefficient.