Finding solutions to Polluted Lake-shore Drinking Water in Rural African Communities: Women, Community Learning and Appropriate Technology

The African Great Lakes (principally Malawi, Victoria and Tanganyika) represent the largest and most secure sources of drinking water for tens of millions of people in East Africa.  Regrettably, however, most of the near-shore areas of these lakes are severely contaminated from faecal, nutrient and organic pollution and are unfit for human consumption, even though 500 m off-shore the water is safe for drinking purposes.  Young children and women and the most severely affected, either directly or indirectly. 

As a result of this widespread situation, residents of shoreline communities are driven inland to secure safe supplies of drinking water, usually from distant, vulnerable, shallow, ground water aquifers.  As a result:

• Women and children must walk many kilometres to fetch water
• New wells are being drilled at much cost, stressing local aquifers 
• Shore-line communities are stagnating because of lost labour and schooling time spent in transporting water back to the community
• Fish landings at such communities are often contaminated by microbial pathogens, thus spoiling a potentially lucrative source of income from export to distant or overseas markets
• Nutrients from human and animal waste are over-fertilizing near-shore waters, giving rise to toxic algal blooms or nuisance growths of water hyacinth, which further degrade shoreline access and use

For the Great Lakes riparian countries, this is a tragic and frustrating misuse of a precious resource.  However, all of these impacts could be mitigated if robust, affordable pollution control programmes and drinking water treatment systems could be instituted for lakeside communities. Low-cost water treatment technologies at the household or community level are capable of dramatically improving the microbial quality of household stored water and reducing the attendant risks of diarrhoeal disease and death.  Even better, are pollution management programmes that prevent release of the nutrients and organic substrates for algae and bacteria.

OBJECTIVES:

The main objective of the proposed project is to develop an integrated planning framework for the provision of safe drinking water to lakeside communities, based on a synthesis of regional Great Lakes experiences, then test its applicability through a pilot project in lakeside Lake Victoria communities in Kenya. The pilot-scale implementation will lead to planning, implementing and operating community-based, women-led pollution control and drinking water treatment programmes.  These lake water treatment programmes and technologies will be designed to be replicable on a large-scale throughout the African Great Lakes Region.

ACTIVITIES:

• Preparatory Consultations with Partners (meeting was held in Kisumu, Kenya in Sep 2008)
• Organize and Evaluate the LVEMP Micro-project Experience
• Expert Synthesis of LVEMP Findings and Framework Development
• Pilot Demonstrations in Selected Lakeside Communities: