On a typical weekday in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, a group of women sits chatting under the shade of a tree a few metres away from a long, winding queue of 20-litre plastic containers and buckets. At the head of the queue, a barefooted boy pulls a half-cut container with a rope from a handmade well and pours the water into one container after the other.
Mary Kawite, with a baby strapped on her back, seems indifferent to the discussions that are going on around her. The first of her four containers is number 10 in the queue. The housewife from Lusaka’s John Laing compound says getting water is an everyday hassle for the residents of this highly populated area.
”We have been drinking water from this well since time immemorial, because there is no tap water here. It is the only well where we can at least access clean water, hence the many people waiting in the queue,” she says. ”The situation is better when it rains. We can then collect rainwater that falls from the rooftops, but when it doesn’t rain, this is our only facility for clean water.”
The well in question remains uncovered for much of the day and a casual look down into it confirms that at some point it was probably used as a dump site for a number of waste products, including plastic bags and pieces of torn clothes.
But thanks to this well, Lazarous Tembo, its owner, is slowly but surely working his way out of poverty. Kawite and other locals part with about 40c for every 20-litre container filled. She says she uses about six containers of water daily.
”This money helps me to maintain a clean environment,” Tembo says, ”and also pays something small to the boy whom I have employed to draw water and fill all the containers every day. I want to start using part of this money to buy chlorine for treating water in line with what health workers advised me recently.”
At a time when Zambia is striving to meet regional and international agreements on the provision of safe, clean drinking water, Kawite epitomises the plight of thousands of Zambians who are living in urban areas, within the reach of the amenities of modern life, but still far away from accessing life’s most basic and critical commodity: clean water.
In other peri-urban settlements of Lusaka, where piped water is available, rationing of the commodity has become the norm and running water comes out of the pipes only for an hour every morning and evening — from 6am to 7am and from 7pm to 8pm.
To make the best of a difficult situation, most residents use the muddy water that collects in ditches after the rains for other household chores and only buy the well’s water for drinking and cooking. ”Some of us have no money to buy 20 litres of water for all our needs. So we use water from the sand quarries for washing, bathing or cleaning plates; we then use water from the well for drinking and cooking,” said Juliet Bwalya.
Zambia has adopted the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which seek to halve the number of people without access to safe, clean drinking water by 2015.
On the domestic front, in a bid to improve water and sanitation services, government decided to commercialise the water sector fully in the late 1990s, with water utility companies assuming the frontline role. Currently, the Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company is the sole utility in charge of supplying water to the nearly two million residents in the capital.
But the utility company blames its inability to meet the increasing demand for the vital commodity in the peri-urban areas — where over 70% of the capital city’s population reside — on the unplanned and informal setup of such settlements.
”The lack of city planning in the peri-urban areas, social setup and cultural diversity of most peri-urban areas of Lusaka, and the fact that sanitation is considered a private and personal matter, make provision of this service a challenge,” said Simon Mwale, a spokesperson for the Lusaka water utility company.
”Since we have the mandate to address both water and waste-water service provision, we have introduced a levy on water consumption to be used to finance sanitation provision in the peri-urban areas of Lusaka,” Mwale continued.
Most Lusaka compounds initially started as illegal settlements, with people building structures without any specific order or plan in place.
And, although the government would later gazette these compounds, there has never been a programme to upgrade them to the standards required to facilitate the installation of water and sanitation facilities.
Mwale said the haphazard nature of buildings in peri-urban areas ”makes it impossible to permanently fix the water problems, because there is no space left for putting in the pipes. So we have started working on a programme to sink a number of boreholes as water points in problematic areas such as John Laing.”
A lack of proper water and sanitation comes at a higher price for Kawite and other residents in the affected peri-urban areas. ”In the rainy season, we always have a lot of people suffering from cholera and dysentery in this area. Even this year, four of my neighbours were admitted to the clinic and one of them died,” Kawite told the M&G.
Cholera and dysentery are perennial diseases in Lusaka during the rainy season. Between November 2006 and March this year, 1 375 cases were recorded, causing 19 deaths.
Ministry of Health spokesperson Velepi Mtonga said poor access to water and sanitation services was a leading cause of cholera and other waterborne diseases in the capital.
”Drinking water must be impeccable at all times. We have so many cholera cases every year in Lusaka during the rainy season, because it is a time when most people use untreated water from shallow wells. Our ad hoc tests of such water facilities, especially in unplanned settlements, have often confirmed that they are actually very contaminated and not fit for human consumption,” Mtonga said.
Calvin Kaleyi, public relations officer for the National Water and Sanitation Council, a government watchdog set up to oversee the operations of utility companies, said the high poverty levels of the peri-urban residents kept them from accessing key amenities, including water. About two-thirds of Zambians live on US$1 or less per day.
”For the poor, [developing, connecting and maintaining] off-site sanitation may be very costly. The practicalities of installing systems would also entail rebuilding most parts of the peri-urban areas, because of the unplanned and haphazard building layout and settlements,” Kaleyi said.
As an intervention, the council is currently encouraging utility companies to set up ventilated pit latrines in areas where access to water is erratic, notwithstanding concerns that it could pollute the underground water upon which most people depend.
International Water Day was celebrated this week