Water and Sanitation

Rural Angola urgently needs clean water

By Macarena Aguilar

Luanda, March 2005 - World Water day celebrations normally mean absolutely nothing to 38 year old Mariana Preciosa. Yet, this year, water day will become an unforgettable one. “The electricity has just come back after an entire month without it and they tell us we are going to have running water in our houses.” Some how sceptical, Mariana adds “I still fail to believe that we are going to open a tap in our houses and get water we can give our children.”

Mariana is mother to four children aged between 20 and 4. For the past two years she lives in Cabiri, a small rural community of 2,000 inhabitants located some 45 kilometres north of Angola’s capital, Luanda. The primary source of livelihood of Cabiri’s inhabitants is growing maize, sweet banana, mango and cassava as well as river fishing. For as long as Mariana recalls, running water has never been available in Cabiri. “During the rainy season we fill our buckets with rain water. In the dry season we need to walk over two kilometres to get to the river to find water, which we still have to boil before drinking,” she says.

Mariana’s daily struggle to secure the needed amount of water is well known across Angola. Only half of the 14 million inhabitants of the oil-rich country have access to safe drinking water. From the estimated 7 million persons that live in the rural areas barely 40% can claim access to potable water compared to 71% of the urban population. The result is an appalling child death rate with one in every 4 Angolan children dying before they reach their fifth birthday mainly due to water and sanitation related diseases like malaria and diarrhoea. As for Angolan girls, especially those living in remote locations, the laborious daily trek to find water leaves them little time to attend school.

But today, Mariana is optimistic. With the support of UNICEF, the Angolan National Directorate for Water has rebuilt and upgraded the old water supply system constructed in the early 60s to serve Cabiri and the neighbouring communities of Camuteba and Mbanza Kitele. The system constitutes pumping water from the nearby Bengo river into a water tank. After treatment, the water is channelled to the settlements through a distribution network. As UNICEF’s Assistant Officer for Water and Sanitation, Manuel Eduardo explains, “the system served its purpose for a few years but during the war both the tank and the pipelines were shelled several times, to the point where they were totally destroyed…Uncertainty about the course of the conflict contributed to just leaving things the way they were.”

The six kilometre-long brand new distribution network and the two huge reservoirs equipped with the latest technology to purify the water extracted from the river, will benefit 3,000 persons. Like Mariana, Cabiri’s inhabitants will have access to running water from the houses. In Camuteba and Mbanza Kitele, considerably less urbanised than Cabiri, the population will collect their water from the newly installed stand posts located in the centre of the villages. With the establishment of a network of laundries in the settlements, women will no longer need to wash the cloths in the river or the lagoon. “Even if it may seem inadequate to you, to us, having potable water so near our homes is almost a dream,” says Paulo Adao, an elderly community leader in Mbanza Kitele. “Since the end of the colonial period in 1975 we haven’t had water in this village. We get our water from an artificial lagoon across the road, the same place where our pigs go drink.”

Existent schools and health centres in the communities have also benefited from the reconstruction of the badly needed water supply system. “Every day in our health centre I see at least 25 children in a space of four hours badly ill with multiple diarrhoeal diseases, acute skin infections and typhoid fever, all due to the lack of safe water.” says Francisca Martinez, one of Cabiri’s nurses.

The race to decrease child mortality in Angola has made UNICEF boost its efforts to bring improved water supply facilities to rural areas. With the support of the Governments of Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, and the private sector including the Italian firm COOP, and the UNICEF National Committees of Germany, the UK and Spain, the goal by 2008 is to increase rural and peri-urban water and sanitation coverage from 40% to 55% and from 25.5% to 36% respectively.

“An additional critical role that UNICEF plays in Angola is to ensure that the most vulnerable, the schools and the health centres are taken into account and not left aside from key ongoing government development plans,” says Dauda Wurie, Head of UNICEF´s Water and Sanitation section in Angola. “With some 44 million USD per year during the next decade, we believe that all of rural Angola could be served with safe water and sanitation facilities…this is by all means an achievable goal in this country.”

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