FairWater's mission
FairWater Foundation
FairWater's mission for Rural Water Supply is to:
- Rehabilitate broken down handpumps
- Promote reliable, cost-effective solutions
- Assist NGOs to create sustainable water points
- Promote free exchange of WatSan information
- inform the public about effective development
Rational: Access to Water and Sanitation (WatSan) services mainly depends on people's capacity to pay. Awareness creation about cost-effective solutions is needed, because most NGOs are still not aware or in denial that they have to change their approach in order to be more cost-effective.
The need is high; about 1/5 of the Earth's population, or 1.1 billion people, currently live on less than $1 a day. Nine of the ten countries with the largest percent of people in this category are in Africa; Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Gambia, Niger, Zambia, Central African Republic, Nigeria, and Mali have over 50% of their populations living in extreme poverty conditions.
Population is increasing: in the last 20 years the percent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day increased from about 300 million in 1990 to over 400 million people today. We are facing a scary and growing humanitarian problem without a solution.
Poverty is the main problem
Obviously, most of these poor people suffer with their basic water supply and sanitation, which means, no acces to public water points and latrines; they simply cannot afford to construct or organize these by themselves. It is therefore not a problem of lack of motivation, or lack of training, awareness, or lack of technology, it is indeed just a matter of lack of money to make water wells & maintain the handpumps or to build proper latrines and getting rid of the human waste in a proper way.
Low-cost maintenance in stead of low-cost equipement
The major challange for a "Fair World" is therefore to implement WatSan facilities that can be maintained by these poor people at low cost. Unless popular belief within many NGOs, this does not mean that these facilities (handpumps, latrines, etc. ) should also be very cheap. Studies show that this is often exactly the opposite.
Cheap solutions are often expensive to maintain. (i.g. India handpumps and rope pumps; cheap to buy, but in the end complicated and expensive to maintain, so not suitable for community water supply).
Over 150.000 handpumps broken down in Africa
"Feel good solutions" are often not sustainable.
We all agree, it feels "so good" to donate for a water project; However, a new borehole with a handpump cost about 20.000 US$, but last less than 3 years. Such water projects may serve to satisfy our guilt feelings for a while, but have no sustainable impact to improve the lives for the people in Africa.
It's FairWater's Mission to promote cost-effective and sustainable way water projects and to to replace broken handpumps in Africa with durable handpumps in stead of drilling in the same village an expensive new borehole with a fragile pump that does not last.