Although the country is doing better on improving access to safe water to its citizens in general, compared to other targets for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), whose target is this year, 2015, it still has a long way to ensure that every one has access to ample supply of safe water.
According to the Malawi Irrigation, Water and Sanitation Sector Report for the period 2012 to 2013, dated 2014, 83 percent of the nation’s population had access to potable water. If disaggregated, 98 percent of the urban population had access to potable water while in the rural areas 81 percent of the population were said to have access to potable water. Therefore, based on the statistics, the country is on course to achieve the MDG target for water supply.
As already stated, the country basically needs to, and does strive to ensure that every one has access to potable water supply. Its only when this is achieved that we will celebrate. This is so because the even the National Water Policy sates as its mission “Water and Sanitation For All, Always”.
It is for this reason that government, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other development partners still pursue provision of more water points, mainly for those who do not have, while maintaining and rehabilitating existing ones.
While all stakeholders are busy doing such noble works to assist the needy people, especially poor ones in remote areas, there is one stumbling block that has been bothering me for the many years that I have been part of those that are involved in ensuring that communities have access to both improved water supply, sanitation and hygiene: communities who choose to isolate themselves and settle in areas that are too remote and mostly too difficult to reach and provide services, including safe water sources. These people usually collect their water from unsafe sources and usually far from their households. Hydro-geologically, most of these places can hardly yield water at a manageable ground depth.
I have seen this several times. I tend to wonder what, in the first place, attracted these people to settle in such hard to reach places which cannot yield any water at all. Are these people victims of witchcraft or selfish people who want to control their own farming coupons?
And the cheeky thing these communities do is to accuse service providers of denying them services such as water supply. Yet these are places which can hardly be provided with such services. I have always been asking myself this question: What should come first, demand for services irrespective of where a community is or order in settlement pattern, where each district should be zoned according to geophysical features, in this case ease of providing water services, then provision of such services and people settling in these communities because there are such services.
This scenario reminds me of observations made by the President, even though it was in a different setup in which he demanded zoning. The President sometime in February ordered Blantyre City Council to introduce new zoning ordinances which were to ensure that buildings were arranged in accordance with their respective purposes.
It’s high time such zoning ordinances are also introduced in rural areas to avoid the scenarios above. I have come to conclude that no matter how hard government agencies, NGOs and development partners try in projects for water services, if some people decided to settle in isolated and difficult areas to provide such services, we will not achieve “Water and Sanitation for All, Always”. It’s high time we had order in community settlement.
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