Zimbabwe > Activities by Sectors
The Need for Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH)
General neglect in recent years has led to a dramatic deterioration in the levels of service in urban water supply and sanitation. In many locations, services are operating at 30 percent of their design capacity, if they operate at all. The ability to run and maintain services has been impacted by a lack of resources including labour, electricity, tools, spare parts, transport, and chemicals. The lack of resources has led to broken pumps, leaking water mains, and blocked sewers. There is limited provision of potable water and of safe disposal and treatment for sewage. In a growing number of towns and suburbs, the water supply has broken down completely and people have to gather water from other sources including streams, ponds, and shallow wells that are often contaminated with sewage.
In rural Gokwe North, most villages and schools do not have protected water sources, instead using riverbed scoop holes, unprotected shallow wells, and rainwater ponds. Villages that have protected sources do not have enough of them–this is due to the scattered nature of the population, and in some cases because the existing pumps are out of order due to the lack of maintenance. A number of water sources produce non-potable water due to high mineral content.
Furthermore, fluoride contamination is a recognised problem in Gokwe North. Therefore, for a variety of reasons, the quality of water consumed by most of the people living in Gokwe North District is of low quality and has been highlighted as a potential cholera transmission route.
Medair's Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Activities
Rehabilitation
Gokwe North (rural)
The program aims to address the risk of water-borne diseases (in particular cholera) through the provision of protected hand-dug wells (HDWs), rehabilitation of existing protected and unprotected wells, and provision of rainwater harvesting tanks to schools for the resident population in the wards of Gokwe North District most affected by the cholera outbreak.
Medair is addressing water quality in several ways, given the seasonality of water sources and low-density nature of the population:
1. Construction of 42 new shallow hand-dug wells, protected and fitted with hand pumps, plus the rehabilitation of 20 existing wells
2. Provision of three rainwater harvesting tanks (30,000 litres each) to 10 schools
3. Hygiene promotion
Gokwe Town
Medair will improve the quantity of water supplied to the inhabitants of Gokwe Town to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases. The project entails repairing existing pumps and motors and installing new pumps and motors where necessary to improve piped water supply in Gokwe Town. Medair will also drill new boreholes and rehabilitate existing boreholes to increase the supply of available water.
