Chidenguele — About 240,000 people living in Chimoio, Manica town and Gondola, the main urban centres in the central Mozambican province of Manica, will gain access to safe drinking water in the next two and a half years.

This massive expansion of the water supply system in the three towns will result from the construction of pipelines carrying water from the reservoir behind the Chicamba dam. This project, budgeted at 31 million euros (about 43 million US dollars), will be launched on 22 June, when the first stone is laid.

According to the chairperson of the government's Water Supply Investment and Assets Fund (FIPAG), Nelson Beete, the construction will take 30 months. In addition to the major towns, it will supply the smaller settlements at Messica and Bandula. All of these places are located along the Manica stretch of the road and railway from the port of Beira to Zimbabwe.

Beete was talking to reporters in an interval during a meeting of the Coordinating Council of the Ministry of Public Works, being held in the resort of Chidenguele, in the southern province of Gaza. He said that, although the entire project will take two and a half years, some of the towns could benefit from improved water supply while the work was still under way.

The Dutch government is financing the project under an agreement that was signed in Maputo on 1 February 2007.