Ensuring long-term disease-free water

It’s is a necessity for thousands of people in Northern Benin.
Throughout all of the 27 villages GAiN visited during a trip in late 2010, 92% of GAiN’s water wells were functional. All but two were working and those wells either just broke or the borehole committee hadn’t contacted the local team to fix it.
Dennis Fierbach, GAiN Canada’s Water for Life Director, was not surprised at the percentage. “Our goal is to create sustainable wells,” he comments. “In the last five years, we have had a very high retention of ongoing working wells.”
The key to this success has been creating an ongoing presence in each village where a well has been drilled. A borehole committee is set up, a small fee is collected by the committee to ensure that small repairs can be done, and a local GAiN team is made accessible for any major repairs.
“What we have noticed is that there have been some organizations throughout Africa that have drilled wells and then left. Instead, we want to ensure that people continue to stay healthy and disease-free, which requires creating water projects that are effective long-term,” explains Dennis.

In December 2010, Dennis saw a well that did just that!
Not too far from the Nigerian border is a deep-capped well that GAiN drilled in Sandilo village on November 22, 2007. Due to its remote location, GAiN had not been back in a while but the systems had been in place so that the well was still producing clean water. There is a woman in charge of maintaining it and collecting the money needed for any repairs.
Within the last few months of 2010, GAiN expanded the project to include rehabilitating wells drilled by other organizations that were either abandoned or had their pumps broken.
Since most of these wells used special pumps, a majority of the parts were too expensive for the villagers to purchase. Therefore, without an ongoing NGO presence in the area to ensure longevity, these wells were no longer usable.
As a result, instead of drilling a new well, GAiN worked with the government of Benin and created a list of 20 wells that could be rehabilitated, restoring the disease-free water it was once providing for thousands.
Peperkou and Tempegre were the first two villages on that list. Both had good wells but no working pumps. Dennis was able to witness the crew installing the new concrete pads and pump bodies. After revitalizing the well, GAiN setup a borehole committee for the villages, trained them to maintain it and then planned for other community development opportunities such as hygiene and sanitation trainings.

To date, GAiN has now drilled 250 wells in Benin, providing over 200,000 people with pure water.

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