A message from Andrew Picken, OBE, Chair of Trustees
Village Water has always focused on integrated water, sanitation & hygiene (WASH) support in rural villages, schools & clinics. In 2019 we reached more than 90,000 men women and children in Zambia and Mozambique, installing, or repairing water points alongside hygiene promotion and basic sanitation.
Improved health, through massive drops in cases of diarrhoea, eye and skin infections give more chances for families to earn a living and for their children to stay in school.
Since the start of this year, the impact of our support has never been clearer: having water and a handwashing facility with soap is the best way to prevent the spread of coronavirus, wherever we live.
We need your continued help to reach more people to ensure that no-one is left behind. I hope you will join us.
Thank you
How and where we work
59% of people in rural Zambia and Mozambique rely on unsafe water from shallow wells, streams and rivers for drinking, bathing and other activities.
83% have no basic toilet facilities, with no option but to use the open bush
With safe water and better hygiene people enjoy healthier lives and more opportunities. Women and girls are freed from the back-breaking task of collecting water for their family’s needs, giving them time for work, school or leisure. The environment improves too as less wood is used when the water source is safe as people no longer boil it before use.
Our achievements and impact
Solar water systems are particularly cost-effective in sun-drenched Zambia and Mozambique for schools where a large number of students need access to clean water. Storage tanks feed a network of taps around the site, and link to sanitation blocks, incorporating flushing toilets, showers and urinals.
Sunshine for Chianga school
With only one insufficient water source and 2 rudimentary latrines serving 531 students, Chianga primary school in Mozambique, benefited hugely from its new latrine block and solar system.
View first-hand the huge success story at Chianga primary school:
Find out more:
Our partners are independent, specialist WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) organisations & over the years we have trained local well construction enterprises & local authority staff, working collaboratively to bring sustainable services to all.
We have adopted a concept known as self-supply: small, incremental improvement to water supplies, funded by the end user, to improve health and productivity. We have seen clients move up the water ladder, starting with a simple cover to their well, right up to low cost solar pumps, depending on how much they can afford to invest.
To service this demand, over the last two years we have supported seven new well construction teams, training them in manual drilling technologies, hydro-geology, well construction, water quality testing, marketing and finance.
The teams have carried out public demonstrations at eleven marketplaces, installing new water-points used by 15,000 people, to showcase what they can offer their clients to start them on the ladder to improve their own water supply.
So far they have helped 2,966 clients, earning on average 229% more than before the training.
Lima ward is an overcrowded, informal peri-urban settlement in Zambia’s capital city Lusaka. Conditions are basic. The water supply is unreliable and with no drainage or sewerage system, thousands of families are at high risk of Covid-19 and cholera among other diseases.
Our UKAid Match funded project will help people living in Lima access the tools and training they need to protect themselves from disease, move away from poverty, improving water quality and waste collection in their community, helping make life safer and easier for everyone.
Village Water Zambia volunteer community health workers have begun by distributing information, education and communication materials, alongside radio shows, roadshows and stakeholder meetings.
Over years of use, water pumps will get old, malfunction and must be repaired. When a water pump breaks, it may take months to fix in districts where there are no spares and no government infrastructure for support. When this happens communities resort to their former dirty water source.
Our partners in Zambia and Mozambique, keep track of all their water points, identifying those that need work and send out teams to make repairs. While in the communities, they will also give hygiene and sanitation promotion sessions, train a newly set-up water committee how to maintain the pump long term and give them a toolkit so they can keep the water flowing.
Cyclone Idai
In March 2019, Mozambique was hit by one of the biggest tropical cyclones ever to affect Africa. We raised emergency funds which supported more than 7,000 people with short-term emergency supplies, and longer-term provision of safe water in two resettlement villages, one of which was a solar pumping system, reaching 1,122 people.
Our 2019 income increased by 36% on 2018. We continue to attract funding from a wide range of supporters, new and long term.
Key successes
We have strengthened our partnership with CO2 Balance who we will be working with for the next five years on carbon emissions reduction programmes in Mozambique and Zambia. We also secured our tenth annual grant from Guernsey Overseas Aid and Development Committee, and ran our second UK Aid Match appeal, which is funding a 2-year project in peri-urban Lusaka, Zambia.
We thank all our supporters for their generous gifts during the year. We acknowledge the on-going assistance of The Waterloo Foundation, The Pacey and Brynberg Foundations, The Randal Charitable Foundation and Wilmslow Wells for Africa, among others, too many to mention.
