Littleton — To enhance life for a rural community in southeastern Nigeria, a U.S.-assisted team is developing a safe and reliable drinking water source from a 150-meter-deep well and then piping the clean water into the Adu Achi village.

Residents of this 3,000-person community now walk more than six kilometers several times a day to a contaminated stream to collect drinking water, wash cassava (their primary food crop), bathe, wash clothing and carry water back to the village.

"Clean drinking water will reduce the stress on women and children, who are now the ones who make daily trips to the stream, and will improve the health of community members who have been ravaged by water-related diseases," Cajetan Ilo, senior lecturer at Ebonyi State University in Nigeria, told America.gov.

"Around the world, more children die from contaminated water, waterborne disease and malnutrition than total deaths from AIDS and breast cancer combined," Mark Shannon, director of the Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems (WaterCAMPWS), told America.gov. "This is the most important problem to solve in the world today."

Rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa face acute water supply challenges. In Nigeria, the most populous African country, more than 50 percent of the country is estimated to lack basic access to safe drinking water.

The Adu Achi project is directed by WaterCAMPWS, a National Science Foundation science and technology center headquartered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The center promotes research at eight U.S. universities and five U.S. laboratories and water institutions to develop new materials and systems for safely and economically purifying water.

The Nigerian project is a partnership between members of the Adu Achi community and students of the UIUC chapter of Engineers Without Borders, a U.S.-based humanitarian organization, with significant help from people at Ebonyi State University and Canadian Samaritans for Africa.

Financial support has come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, UIUC Engineering Design Council, UIUC International Programs in Engineering, Uni-Bell PVC Pipe Association, Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB), the Chicago professional chapter of EWB, U.K. PipeFlow Corp. and a Mondialogo Engineering Award from Daimler AG corporation and UNESCO.

SUSTAINABLE WATER DEVELOPMENT

"Clean drinking water will improve community health and provide water needed to process cassava," Maren Somers, EWB project coordinator, told America.gov. "The most significant benefit of the improved water supply, however, will likely be seen in the time savings for the women and children, who will then be able to divert more time to income generation and education, respectively."

Every day, water is required to wash cassava, and the washing process releases starch and naturally occurring cyanide from the vegetable, which further contaminates the stream used as a water source. Future cassava-washing basins in the village have been designed in conjunction with Canadian Samaritans for Africa to eliminate the need to walk to the stream to obtain water, and to better manage the resulting cyanide-contaminated wastewater.

Since WaterCAMPWS began its involvement in 2005, UIUC faculty and students have visited Nigeria three times. The next trip will be in April to install the well pump, test water quality and complete the distribution system.

Project members investigated options to power the well pump, including wind, solar and palm biofuel, but the recent connection of the community to the electrical power grid provides an option far more affordable than any of those fuels. Because electricity remains intermittent, a diesel generator will serve as a backup power supply.

"A key aspect of this project is working with the rural community to enable residents to oversee and manage the water system, which will allow the system to be operational in the future," said Shannon, a UIUC professor. "This transfer of ownership is critical in developing countries."

Community health and sanitation education has been a group effort by Nigerian public health students from Ebonyi State University, EWB, the Adu Achi community water committee and the Nigerian Society for Family Health, which is supported in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The team held participatory health meetings in Adu Achi. The top health concerns were determined to be malaria, birth control, AIDS and diarrhea.

Current health outreach focuses on combating malaria with medication and bed nets and providing household chlorination of drinking water.

FUTURE PLANS

Adu Achi is one of 12 Achi clan communities, all of which are affected by contaminated water sources. The team would like to continue working in the region to meet the needs of these villages.

"If more funding becomes available, we hope to provide the closest neighboring community, Ehuhe Achi, with pipeline access to the well. Other forthcoming initiatives may include sanitation improvements, such as wastewater management and latrines," Somers said.

In the future, UIUC might be able to bring Nigerian students to the Illinois campus.

The partnership between the Nigerian and American students was positive for the Nigerian students, Ilo said, "especially for the female Nigerian students who now see that they can develop their potential beyond what the local norms prescribe. This new state of mind was informed by the skills and competences they observed in their female counterparts from the U.S."

More information is available at the Web sites of WaterCAMPWS and the Engineers Without Borders chapter at UIUC.