FairWater's focus is on:
- Over 150.000 handpumps are broken down due to missing spare parts, therefore FairWater rehabilitates abandoned handpumps with the durable FairWater Africa pump. that can be maintained locally without the need for spare parts.
- Public Water points will only be sustainable if they have a management model that provides an additional income to a caretaker. FairWater therefore promotes innovative and fair privatised water-management solutions in rural Africa.
"No safe water: Every 20 seconds a child dies"
That is the well-known fundraising phrase most NGOs use for more than 20 years. The public is supposed to just send funding for more wells with standard handpumps to solve these water problems.
However, it is now becoming clear that water projects are not transparent and people are getting worried that their donations are wasted and used for overheads, conferences, PR, etc. buty not to actually help communities in a cost-effective way.
In spite of all these efforts, all studies indicate that the average donor handpump only last about 3 years ... That's clearly "Not-Fair" to these communities ... But most NGOs continue to "give away" cheap and fragile handpumps that do not last...
FairWater has a different approach and offers sustainable & realistic solutions for rural water supply in Africa with two unique key-points:
FairWater is cost-efective
We replace broken down handpumps with a durable Africa pump, on the request of the communities, to avoid that all the previous investment of the water point (drilling, community training, old handpump, etc.) is lost. To assure sustainability, we train professional Regional Maintenance Teams (RMT) to install the Africa pump and to assist communities with any problems they may have, based on a maintenace contract.
FairWater is transparent
We do not have high overheads or expensive local offices, but we team up with the local private sector. All our partners and projects can be found on our project website www.watsan.org where our donors can actually select and handpumps that they want to be replaced with a durable Africa pump and the results.
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Africa pump in Mozambique
Recently, FairWater evaluated an large rehabilitation project in Mozambique to replace abandoned handpumps in very deep boreholes with the FairWater Africa pump. The overall conclussion is that the population is very happy with this new technology and that most pumps are functioning without any major problem.
In Mozambique many handpumps were broken down, mainly due to the lack of spare parts and the absence of a regional maintenance scheme. The Government of Mozambique is now trying to improve this situation with better O&M practise and to introduce more reliable handpumps like the FairWater Africa pump. Therefore the Unicef project installed last August 2009 a total of 35 Afripumps with bottom support in boreholes with abandoned handpumps.