Harare — Water supplies are under increasing strain all around the world. As populations grow and cities expand, fresh water sources are depleted or contaminated. This is the case in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, where the availability of clean water has steadily decreased over the years and this long unresolved water crisis is a ticking time bomb of magnified health risks for residents.
The city has gone without drinkable water for years, a situation that has forced residents to find alternatives, many even having to turn to potentially contaminated wells and boreholes. The task of gathering enough clean water to drink, cook and wash consumes many people's lives, with mostly women and children bearing the brunt of the shortage.
To mitigate water scarcity and recurrent diarrhoeal outbreaks, MSF's Environmental Health Project is diagnosing the existing boreholes with the main focus on providing clean water to the beneficiaries, but also to understand the underlying causes of bacteriological contamination in borehole water. MSF also conducted geophysical surveys to increase the quantity of water with some of the boreholes now providing over 30,000 litres of water per hour, where the average borehole drilled in Harare is merely 2000 litres per hour.
For people living near dysfunctional or damaged boreholes, getting clean potable water meant organising their schedules and lives around reaching other water sources. Water collection would often mean poor families have to walk far distances, pay money to access water points on a daily basis, or wake as early as 2am each day to collect water, says MSF.
Stoneridge is on the outskirts of Harare, where people fetched water from unprotected wells - most often contracting diarrhoeal diseases and or even dying of typhoid, after drinking contaminated water.
"When the project was introduced (in Stoneridge), we benefited as a family as we now have access to clean water. Children can now have access to clean water in our homes and the rest of the community, and even our homes and environment are clean too because we now have water. This reduced the spread of diarrhoeal diseases in our homes and the rest of the community," Precious Kapesa, a Stoneridge resident told MSF.
Since 2015, MSF has placed 72 water distribution points (boreholes) in Harare, equipped with submersible, solar powered pump and tank systems. However, the challenge of ensuring Harare's residents have access to clean water cannot only be solved by finding new water sources or rehabilitating boreholes.
In Stoneridge, the MSF team and community partners run a pilot project aimed at reducing the risk of contaminated wastewater, which had previously been stored in septic tanks. These tanks were prone to leaks contaminating the groundwater in the area and contributing to recurrent diarrhoeal outbreaks.
"The area was poorly sanitated. Those old septic tanks were built in such a way that they were shallow and if the water table rises the whole underground water was contaminated," says Farai Wafawareva, another Stoneridge resident and community partner.
In order to mitigate the risk of Stoneridge's water table becoming contaminated by these underground septic tanks, MSF replaced them with a new wastewater management system.
Water and Sanitation Supervisor Ignitions Takavada says the communal waste treatment unit treats all the wastewater that is coming from the households and then the water is recycled to be used again in the toilet and for irrigation of the gardens.
"We are enjoying a good environment, good flora and fauna, good agricultural output. So when this project started, new decongesters were connected to this treatment center, So we now have all our waste being piped. So there's no contamination of the ground or contamination of the water. We are so proud and humbled to have such a good system," Wafawareva adds.
Since launching, the Stoneridge wastewater and bio-degradable waste management project has seen zero groundwater contamination.
Harare's water situation is largely the same as in 2008, when Zimbabwe experienced the most devastating cholera outbreak in Africa in 15 years, an outbreak that, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), killed over 4,000 people and infected at least 100,000.
The city's perennial water crisis, which is linked to the cholera outbreak, is the result of the city's obsolete water infrastructure, a ballooning population, severe droughts, and pervasive government corruption and mismanagement, according to HRW which says poor governance and disputes between the central government and the Harare City Council have hindered efforts to address the problems.
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Weather and rainfall patterns with extreme weather events making water more scarce, more unpredictable, more polluted or all three. These impacts throughout the water cycle threaten sustainable development, biodiversity, and people's access to water and sanitation. It exacerbates water stress, areas of extremely limited water resources, leading to increased competition for water, even conflict.
UNICEF says by 2040, almost 1 in 4 children will live in areas of extremely high water stress.
That's why the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP27, is a make-or-break moment for global action on climate change. The conference will be held from November 6 to 18, 2022, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
