Safe drinking water: A must for all Zambians
By Bruce Chooma
WATER is a basic requirement for all life and good sanitation is essential for health.
It is, therefore, important that clean and safe water should be available to all if society is to avoid water-borne diseases and maintain acceptable levels of hygiene.
Zambia has been recording a steady increase in the urban population that has seen the mushrooming of poorly-planned peri-urban settlements in major cities, especially in the capital city, Lusaka.
According to the Environmental Council of Zambia’s State of the Environment Report 2000, the country is endowed with sufficient water resources to meet the present and foreseeable future demand of water that should to be used in a sustainable manner.
‘Ground water is fairly evenly distributed and most areas depend on it while surface water is unevenly distributed, which results in some areas experiencing shortages.
“The southern half of the country is the most affected although it gets the largest annual run-off,” the report reads in part.
Although 75 per cent of the water supplied by local authorities and utility companies is treated surface water, the majority of Zambians, especially those in rural and peri-urban areas, drink untreated water.
The Water and Sanitation Association of Zambia (WASAZA) estimates that only 62 per cent of the population has access to safe water while commercial utilities provide water to only 47 per cent of the urban population.
In Zambia, drinking water has to conform to the Department of Water Affairs guidelines under the Ministry of Energy and Water Development.
Kennedy Meleki, a resident of Chipata township, a peri-urban settlement north of Lusaka, expressed concern at the hardships the residents are subjected to in accessing clean water.
He said clean water was only made available at specific times of the day from the community water taps.
He said the residents, especially women, have to rise up early in the morning to queues for the commodity at these taps for a limited time that the operators open them.
“Our worry is that there is need to find ways of increasing water supply to this compound. The situation here has resulted in increased child labour incidents as children are forced to carry heavy containers of water from these taps.
“Water should be made more accessible to everyone for longer hours, if possible 24 hours a day, but that is not the case here. Some residents still dig shallow wells for water.
“We need more community taps and the water supply companies should look for money to lay a piped network of water and sewerage,” Mr Meleki said.
From 1996 to 1999, national coverage of safe drinking water improved from 46 to 57 per cent and Zambia had 105 water schemes and about 35 sewer systems, although access to safe drinking water is still inadequate.
This rapid population growth without matching water and sanitation infrastructure has prompted the National Water and Sanitation Council (NWASCO) to consider ways of working with commercial utility companies in seeking solutions.
NWASCO has a programme of installing water kiosks in partnership with commercial utilities (CUs) in peri-urban areas under the Devolution Trust Fund (DTF) project funded by Development Cooperation Ireland.
The Government, in responding to the high numbers of people living in low income urban areas without adequate access to safe water and sanitation, instituted the DTF under the water regulator.
The goal was to ensure that CUs used this fund to accelerate improvement of service provision to the peri-urban areas.
The DTF was set up in 2002 and demonstration projects to consolidate the approach used have been carried out in four separate CUs under which 80,000 people in the low income urban areas have been served with affordable and adequate clean water.
NWASCO public relations officer, Calvin Kaleyi, said the institution was targetting to spend 20 million pounds in a space of 11 years through the DTF towards the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on water.
“We need to spend up to 20 million pounds, which is 1.8 million pounds annually, to spread coverage to peri-urban areas that are not serviced currently. Taking the current urban population living in low income areas estimated at 3.9 million.
“Instead of having two million or more people without access to clean water in 2015, we would only have 1.2 million people. We, therefore, consider water kiosks as the immediate and effective answer to the problem of access to clean and safe drinking water in peri-urban areas” Mr Kaleyi said.
Goal seven of the MDGs is to ensure environmental sustainability. Target 10 under goal seven aims at halving, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.
Mr Kaleyi said kiosks are linked to the main network and the kiosk operator signs a contract with the CU responsible for supervision and maintenance of the system.
“In order to ensure reasonable income for the operator, provision is made for the sale of other goods at the kiosk. Currently, an increasing number of peri-urban areas in Zambian towns are serviced through water kiosks. The areas are Chipata, Monze, Kitwe and Livingstone and a large number of residents appreciate the system.” Mr. Kaleyi said.
Mr Kaleyi said that NWASCO had set up water watch groups with a view of increasing citizens’ participation in the effective monitoring of water supply as well as increase consumer knowledge on their role in ensuring consistent and quality water and sewerage services provision.
“A lot of people are ignorant and, therefore, fail to claim a quality service. For instance, on sewer blockages, some people prefer to get plumbers from the streets to work on them when they pay for water and sewerage services.
They think only water is paid for but the bill includes sewer services as well they need to demand for this service when ever necessary” Mr. Kaleyi said.
The Environmental Council of Zambia (ECZ) communications officer Chama Nyendwa said she was concerned that some residents in peri-urban settlements still dug wells and pit latrines indiscriminately, hence, compromising on the water standards and worsening the spread of waterborne diseases.
She said there were specific distances that should be observed when digging pit latrines and water wells whenever they become an option due to lack of piped water.
“We have often said that when residents have to dig pit latrines if there is a water well, it should be on higher land surface and the pit latrine on lower surface to avoid water from the latrine finding its way to the water wells and contaminating that water in the process.
“The pit latrines and wells should be apart by a specific distance but this is often overlooked. We are also concerned about the number of pit latrines and wells because everyone who owns a plot wants to dig a well on the plot, so you find too many wells and pit latrines and that poses environmental and health hazards ” Mrs Nyendwa said.
She said industrial water pollution had not been a big problem in Zambia since it was monitored closely by the institution by way of licensing.
She said the licenses were for disposal of waste with a specific PH into rivers that is so low that it cannot contaminate the river.
The ECZ conducts quarterly inspections to monitor the quality of water being supplied. Hence, the regulation is very effective.
The challenge of water contamination is now coming from a different source, the fishing communities especially in rural areas.
There has been a tendency of using insecticide treated mosquito nets for fishing purposes that has resulted in contamination of water and loss of aqua life.
Such contamination is difficult to curb since the source is often hard to trace as the impact spreads further downstream and people pick dead fish and other forms of water life get destroyed.
Because most of the water supplied to the cities is drawn from rivers, their contamination by careless fishermen poses another challenge to the purification of this water by water supply companies and the local authorities.
“We have environmental sensitisation programmes on Radio Yatsani and Radio Four of the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation.
“We are trying to diversify into the provinces by forming partnerships with other radio stations there so that we can have a wider platform for reaching out with this message at community level,” Mrs Nyendwa said.
The challenge is without doubt big and growing in complexity by the day and as we draw towards the world water day, we should seriously study possibilities within our reach in attaining safe and clean drinking water for our urban population.
