Will power

Truth is, outside of the main cities in Malawi, most people don’t have running water in their house and have to walk sometimes long distance to fetch water. The waterpoints that are considered safe and protected are either a borehole, a shallow well, a tap or a protected spring. Most villages have at least a few protected waterpoints, if not many, that have been installed over the last 25 years by NGOs or government or someone else. Some remote and hardly accessible areas are less lucky and don’t have any safe water to drink. But in general, one of the problem that we see, is that waterpoint users (villagers or communities) are not willing to pay for the water (taps) or to repair their boreholes. When NGOs come to install a borehole in a community, they set a waterpoint committee. They train them to fix some of the smaller breakdowns and to do the maintenance, they also tell them that they will need to have the users raise money to cover for the expenses. This fails in most cases. The majority of the committees don’t raise money on a regular basis, but decide to ask contributions only once there is a breakdown. This leads to water shortage, sometimes for a few days, sometimes up to over a year. In some cases, people don’t want to contribute and decide to go use a different functional waterpoint further instead of contributing money to buy spare parts and get their borehole fixed. The committees don’t have enough motivation or authority over the other villagers to enforce payment. They don’t really keep track or record how much money was spent, who contributed and how much they have. They normally don’t have a bank account, so the treasurers need to keep the money at their house. Right now, I’m doing a research to see if the traditional authorities (village’s chiefs) are taking responsibility of the waterpoints to help the committees with raising money. I’m trying to see if bylaws exist and if so if and how they are enforced. In Malawi the waterpoints in villages outside of the BOMA (city), fall under the responsibility of the community, not under the responsibility of the government or traditional authority.  So if the communities are not ready to take care of it, chances are they will run out of safe waterpoints to draw their water from. It is a concern, it is a key and it is an important place to spend energy trying to find solutions to help them.

In Canada, if I didn’t have to pay my bills because no one was enforcing the laws, and if they would let me go and I would still have gaz, electricity and water even if I don’t pay , I would probably not pay. Would you? Even if I consider all these things really important to have and would not want them to break. People in villages have money, not a lot but sufficiently to cover for the amount of money that the waterpoint committees are asking them. The problem is that they prefer to spend this money somewhere else than raising money for the next repair. And when comes the next repair, they might not have the money right away because it’s the dry season and they are broken, or simply because they don’t have the will to pay, knowing that someone else in the village will eventually cover for them. No one really enforces or keep track of the payments. It’s so frustrating. I’m trying to see if bylaws and fines, or punishment exist in some villages to see if these community have a better functioning rate (waterpoint) and less water shortage. So far, I’m disappointed with the way that most villages work. It would be so easy and so much better if someone was putting their foot down and making people pay. In my interviews with chiefs and waterpoint committee’s chairmen, I’m hearing a lot of lies and non sense. It’s hard to get a good and accurate idea of what is really happening and what they trully think of their system. I saw some great chiefs though, with a lot of leadership who care about the well being of their community. These chiefs have, on the side, a development fund to assist the village. They’re either raising money on a regular basis to save in a bank account or they have small communal businesses to raise money. Example I’ve seen are: moulting bricks businesses. Some men are making them and selling them to contractors outside of the village. The money goes to the development funds. I’ve also seen a village where each waterpoint had a communal garden to take care of and the money from the sells were going to the development fund to offer assistance for the eventual repairs. Men and women were taking turns to work on it. Communities with such cooperatives seem to stand out and be a bit more self sufficient. Is this a key on how to help communities raise money? Who knows, they are not frequent enough right now for me to draw conclusions. Although it seems to be working well and it is inspiring. Could we have every chief starting such a thing, would this work in every village? Does it take a certain type of leader to have these businesses or coop running well? I’ll try to push this idea and answer these questions through my research. I still have 25 villages to visit and two or three weeks to go.

To my coworkers, think about a bad day of fieldwork or a badly managed project…this is like my everyday work here! Thinks are very poorly organized and management is definitely lacking. The main problems: Malawians seem to have a vague idea of the concept of being in time. Everyone is consistently late, and I mean up to a few hours late! Malawi has a fuel shortage, so every now and then, there is no fuel available to go in the field with the motorcycle. Other days it’s the rain forcing us to start late. Right now is the wet season, so people are busy in the field harvesting, it makes it hard to meet them. Most of the time it is a combination of all of the above and more. Some odd days are going surprisingly well though. Most days I go back home with maize, a few pumpkins, eggplants, some unknown and delicious fruits or veggies and yesterday I even got a watermelon. The people we meet are super nice and are generous. I think they are glad to be heard, to be considered in my research. Hopefully we can someday find a way to help them help themselves!

Ok, I’m done for now. I’m going to the lake now. Good way to end the day and wash the sweat away!

Ge