Water and Effluent Treatment Magazine
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10 WET NEWS OCTOBER 2016 ONSITE waTER supply surveys were loaded on to smartphones, and Gps coordinates were recorded for each village GPS and smartphones make mission possible • working as a 'watsan' engineer for MsF, atkins' Jo Read reports on her six months spent in the Hadjer-lamis region of central Chad. projEcT SpEcS • support and manage the local water and sanitation teams • Construct a new wash zone, comprising latrines, showers and clothes washing areas • upgrade the water supply system for a regional hospital • Design the waste management and disposal system for a vaccination campaign C onflict in neighbouring Nigeria spilled over into Chad in 2015 and thousands of people congregated in makeshi sites throughout the Lake Chad region, without adequate shelter, food or water. MSF began providing assistance in March 2016 and from September, mobile clinics served the host community and displaced people in Bol, including the provision of 350 kits of hygiene items and 264 water purifying kits. While MSF's primary focus is medical, many of its projects cannot function without a water and sanitation element. In the humanitarian context, this means the provision of safe water in sufficient quantities, ensuring that sanitation facilities are adequate (to prevent the spread of disease) and that the populations – from large refugee camps, to small rural health clinics – understand how to protect themselves and others. I was responsible for the water and sanitation across three of MSF's projects in Chad. This involved supporting and managing the local water and sanitation teams on tasks such as the construction of a new wash zone, comprising latrines, showers and clothes washing areas, in a malnutrition referral centre; the upgrading of the water supply system for one of the regional hospitals; and the design of the waste management and disposal system for a vaccination campaign. A large part of my time was spent responding to a malnutrition crisis in Bokoro, in central Chad. This was the fourth time in five years that MSF had responded to a malnutrition crisis in the region, and in 2015 the decision was taken to implement prevention strategies alongside the emergency response. Improving access to safe water at a village level is a key element of the preventative programme. Poor quality Information was collected on water source condition and type drinking water and poor sanitation result in water borne diseases such as diarrhoea, which prevent sufferers from being able to utilise fully the food they eat, increasing the risk of malnutrition. Water was the priority for the majority of villages. Many people had to walk for hours, pay a lot at private boreholes or drink water that looked like mud. In fact, whole villages would come out to talk to us about their water problems. Improving access to safe water is easier said than done. The first step was to understand the causes of the problem. What is preventing villages from having access to safe water at the moment? To try to answer this, we collected information on the type and condition of the water sources in each of the 600-plus villages in the Bokoro area, completed water quality tests, studied the local geology, and interviewed village leaders and local pump mechanics and drill teams. Two key findings stood out: • While more than 70% of villages had access to a borehole fitted with a hand- pump, about 40% of these hand-pumps were not working. The pumps broke down extremely regularly, and this was backed up by our water quality test results, which showed that the water in some