Water UK

Water witness: bringing clean water and sanitation to Mali’s poorest

Clean break: safe water and proper sanitation will help tackle a death rate among children of 1 in 5 by the age of five.

15/03/08

Images: WaterAid / Therese Mahon / Daniel O’Leary

When she was recently made vice chair of the development charity WaterAid, Water UK’s chief executive Pamela Taylor wanted to see for herself the sort of work the water and sanitation charity was doing.

Her appointment recognises the important contribution UK water companies make to WaterAid, in terms of fundraising and wider support.

Pamela says: “Water companies do the most extraordinary, interesting and exciting things in order to raise money for WaterAid. For me to be able to go to see the impact that’s having is a privilege.”

The next trip WaterAid had lined up was to Mali, a landlocked West African country, twice the size of France and with a population of around 14 million.

Poverty ranking

Mali is grindingly poor, ranked 174 out of 177 countries by the United Nations’ 2005 Human Development Index, with around two-thirds of its population living below the poverty line.

In this primarily rural country, life expectancy is just 48, with one in five children dying before the age of five.

Pamela seized the opportunity to join this gruelling five-day trip in January. Along with briefings from WaterAid and its partners in Mali, the itinerary included field visits to both rural and urban communities and meetings with the ministers for water and sanitation.

Pamela was struck by the juxtaposition of dire living conditions and a spirited people.

“There’s poverty, poverty and more poverty, and then even more poverty,” she says. “And yet in the face of what to us is unremitting hopelessness, the people of Mali don’t behave like that at all. They don’t behave as if everything is hopeless, or as if the world owes them anything. They behave as people who can engage with you. The people see hope.”

She describes how welcoming, courteous and hospitable the people were – at one point she was offered goats’ milk and a live chicken by villagers who had very little themselves – and how there was widespread willingness to engage and participate in making things better.

Groundwork

This is perhaps in no small part due to the sheer skill and persistence of WaterAid’s Malian team. Around 20 staff, based in the capital Bamako, work tirelessly at every conceivable level to effect change. This ranges from developing water strategy nationally to planning regional rollout programmes to physically building new facilities at ground level with villagers.

Pamela explains there is also a ceaseless programme of education.

“It’s very hard to persuade any government with limited resources of the economics of providing clean drinking water and sanitation… to many of these countries it appears a luxury behind the likes of building a road.

"It’s not surprising as a lot of people have no idea that drinking contaminated water is harmful for them, that not having proper hygiene is harmful, that not having a latrine is harmful and so on.”

WaterAid conducts months of work on good hygiene and sanitation practices in villages before drilling wells or building latrines.

Pamela was able to witness first-hand the stark difference WaterAid’s work is making. She recalls the shocking poverty of one village she visited, where the charity is yet to begin its work.

“To see a village where there are no latrines, nothing. And to see people just squatting down. And to see them mashing small seeds in a bowl rather like a pestle and mortar and adding water, which of course is contaminated – and that’s their food. And that’s also their lives… When I left that village, I thought ‘those people are born there, they’ll live there, they’ll die there and that’s it’ – and I’m driving away.”

In contrast, clean water and sanitation can bring not only health improvements but also the ability to grow crops, keep livestock, barter, and free up girls’ time for education.

Small beginnings

Pamela says: “Because of water and sanitation, you can see villages beginning to reach out and almost create some kind of – I’m not going to give it as grand a term as a local economy – but where there was nothing there is beginning to be something.”

And that’s not to mention the sheer joy improvements can bring to individuals. Pamela smiles as she recalls: “I met an old woman who was blind and had to use the communal latrine, which meant feeling her way there with her hands and so on. And they (WaterAid) built her one of her own. This old lady was so happy. She took us to see her latrine and she sat on it for us and all the rest of it, and at the end of it all she did a little dance.”

Changing lives

To those who question whether investing in countries that are in as dire a state as Mali is worth it, Pamela says: “I know some people would say ‘if it’s Africa it doesn’t matter what you do, because tomorrow there’ll be a riot or flood or whatever and the whole thing will be wiped away’.

"But I know that if you were there, you wouldn’t feel it and you wouldn’t think it. Every well and every latrine makes such a difference to people’s lives that it’s worth it.”

She urges the water industry and all its staff to keep up the good work and in fact to redouble their efforts.

“All the fundraising efforts that people do, if they could visit Mali and see what can be done with a small amount of money and what a fantastic difference it makes to people's lives, I hope that people would want to go on raising that money. The sums are really really small to transform people’s lives and make children live where they would die.”

A version of this article appeard in Utility Week, 14 March.