Madimba water and sanitation project
Madimba is a semi-urban area on the edge of Lusaka with a population of over 7,000 people. The community is very well organised, it has already installed a number of composting toilets, but many people still have to walk over 1 km to get safe water. We are delighted and grateful that WfK has been awarded its largest ever grant to provide water for the people of Madimba. A UK family Trust has agreed to pay £12,000, well over half of the total cost.
Madimba is not only very densely populated, it also has a very high water table; this means that pit latrines tend to overflow and contaminate the shallow wells.
There are high levels of disease particularly affecting children and cholera outbreaks occur during most rainy seasons. The only safe water is between 0.5 and 1.2 km away.
In 2003 the Madimba community set up the Network for the Environmental Concerns and Solutions (NECOS). (One of its founder members, Obed Kwanga, is an Environmental Health Officer, who lives there.) Its approach to development is based on community participation and concern for the environment. The Necos profile says its focus is on “People oriented, eco-residency development, which requires the comprehensive understanding of complex interactions between environmental, economic and socio-cultural factors based on ecological principles.” One of Necos’s main objectives is to “address the bad practices in sanitation and public health so as to improve the general living environment of the people in peri – urban settlements creating a culture of cleanliness and sustainable developmen.”
Necos has worked with the community in Madimba to set out its priorities, their method promotes ownership of the development process based on community participation. The first priority they have addressed is to install sealed composting toilets to households requesting them. As the toilets are sealed, they will not leak when it rains, this will reduce the spread of disease. By the end of 2010, 35 toilets will have been installed, with households paying according to their means, or for free. Funding for the toilets has been secured from Finland.
The second Necos priority to be addressed is safe water. WfK, with the grant from the Leff-Pillon Trust, has agreed to pay approximately £20,000 to provide a water kiosk, supplied from a new borehole and water tower, and two public composting toilets for the people of Madimba. They will be sited next to a school, which will pay for the electricity supply to pump the water from the borehole to the water tower, which will supply the water kiosk. The installation will be the same as WfK provided in Fumbelo. On completion, health education and maintenance training will be carried out. The new facilities will be handed over to the Neighbourhood Health Committee to ensure they are available to the whole community for many years to come.
Obed Kawanga summarised the project as follows:
“Madimba peri-urban settlement is basically not serviced by basic services such as water supply and sanitation, lack of these services resulted into increased incidences of diarrhoea, cholera and other preventable diseases especially among the children. The baseline survey which was conducted by Necos revealed that water and sanitation ranked high in the needs of the settlement. It is against this background that Necos is seeking assistance from donor institution to address the endemic nature of preventable diseases, through hygiene promotion and construction of dry toilets. To ensure long term sustainability the organisation is implementing a cost sharing and cross subsidisation approach, with a view of achieving cost recovery and increase the number of beneficiaries. Currently the promotion of the toilets is demand driven. It is therefore important to note that the access to water and good sanitation will greatly assist the settlement to mitigate preventable diseases especially among the children who are most vulnerable and will help them concentrate on school and other productive activities, resulting in reduction of poverty and enhanced sustainable development.”
ZIEH News article on Madimba (pdf)
