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The water pump at Matunkha Primary School has been broken for seven years. Here, in the western part of Rumphi district, their nearest water source is a pit dug into a river bed about 3km away. For the nearly 500 students attending this school, water collection takes almost two hours. This is the product of a failing system.
Many parts of the pump are broken and the cost of repair will be high. The head teacher, Mr Sandres K. Sapwe, says that they have attempted to raise funds to repair the pump in the past, but they never successfully raised enough to restore the pump to functionality. Now, they are unsure of what to do.
The story of Matunkha begs the question: who is responsible? How could such a thing be allowed to happen, even after the school had received a protected water source?
Jacob Mkandawire, the Rumphi District Water Officer is all too familiar with the challenges faced by communities. However, with a monthly budget of ~50,000 Malawian Kwacha (USD$300), he doesn’t have much to work with. After paying water and electricity bills, plus assisting with the purchase of medication for HIV positive staff members, there isn’t much left to support schools like Matunkha and its surrounding community of Nkhonongo. Most of his repair services are limited to times when large numbers of spare parts are provided by central government – when a borehole maintenance program is authorized. The rest of the time he does the best he can with what he has.
This, of course, also assumes that Mr. Mkandawire knows about schools like Matunka. Without an updatable information management system owned by the district, information critical for decision making (i.e. the location and severity of breakdowns) is unavailable. Without good information or sufficient resources, it is no wonder that schools like Matunkha continue to lack support.
For many, the knee jerk reaction is to simply fix the water pump. For less than a couple hundred dollars, the school could have access to clean water again – the kind of tagline that sells only all too well in the Western media. Although it is true that the pump at Matunkha could be fixed by a Non-Government Organization (NGO) with a little funding, it would do nothing to address the fact that pumps elsewhere will continue to break and remain broken. NGO programmes come and go, sometimes leaving the false – and even dangerous – expectation that, if communities wait long enough, help will eventually come.
What will keeps pump functioning in the long term is a set of complimentary roles and responsibilities held by the permanent local actors: community, government, and the private sector. Determining exactly what these roles are, how they fit together, and supporting each player to be effective is not easy, but it is essential. It is about a lot more than repairing the pump at Matunkha; it is about creating a system that works.
