Safe Water Network Quenching the thirst of rural, peri-urban communities
Ghana may have met and surpassed its Millennium Development Goal [MDG] target of 75 per cent for water, but the reality is that there are still millions of people without reliable safe water access.
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It is estimated that more than six million in Ghana’s rural areas and small towns do not have access to safe drinking water, while nearly 85 out of every 100 people do not have access to adequate sanitation.
According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) 2015 Report, more than 650 million people in the world do not have access to safe water.
The lack of access to the two basic needs of humanity has resulted in an annual loss of lives of 4,000 children under five years old in Ghana.
Globally, around 500,000 children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation - that's over 1,400 children a day, a UNICEF report, titled Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed - Progress Report 2014, affirms.
Meanwhile, the 2006 United Nations Development Programme [UNDP] Human Development Report states that water in Accra costs three times as much as in New York, while “women in Africa and Asia often carry water on their heads weighing 20kg, the same as the average UK airport luggage allowance.”
A mission to fulfil
It is to address the challenges with providing safe water access that Safe Water Network [SWN] was formed with a mission to develop and demonstrate affordable, economically viable solutions for sustainable community water supply in Ghana and across the developing world.
Since its establishment in Ghana in 2009, SWN, has together with its partners, launched 28 water stations at an estimated cost of almost US$4 million, to provide reliable safe water access to over 160,000 people in 52 communities. The stations have been grouped in four clusters spanning the Ashanti, Eastern, Greater Accra, Western, and Volta regions.
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SWN’s partners and funders include the Conrad N. Hilton, Stone Family, Vitol, Osprey, Pepsico and Newman’s Own Foundations, KOSMOS Energy, BGI LLC, CISCO, Volta River Authority Resettlement Trust, Relief International and Ghanaman GRG Trust Fund.
An essential part of SWN’s work is the monitoring of key performance indicators to ensure sustainability of its water stations.
These include the production of water that meets the relevant national water quality standards and covering of operating expenses from water revenue to contribute to a maintenance reserve to support ongoing repair, maintenance and future expansion of water stations.
Other indicators measured include ensuring that each water station stays unoperational for less than five per cent of the time and that after three years of operation, 75 per cent of people living within 200 metres of a station buy water from the station. Currently, on average 52 per cent of people within 200 metres purchase water from the water stations.
“We’ve also launched a programme to establish the health and economic impacts of stations at scale. This is a critical aspect of our work to advance greater investment in market-based approaches to community water supply”, Mr Charles Nimako, Safe Water Network’s Country Director told the Daily Graphic.
The Safe Water Station module
Safe Water Stations are community-level water treatment facilities producing high-quality water sold at 10Gp to 15Gp for 20 litres in the communities where SWN operates. Locally operated and managed, the stations generate enough revenue from water sales to cover operating and maintenance costs (in some cases they partially recover capital as well). Stations serve communities of about 3,000 people with costs ranging from approximately GH¢ 200,000 to over GH¢ 400,000.
Water quality is measured on a regular basis and results displayed at water stations. A field service support also provides cost effective maintenance and the repair of stations, while a community Water and Sanitation Management Committee (WSMC), drawn from local residents, and a three-member cluster level support team has been established to provide technical support to all water stations within a cluster.
Water treatment technologies
The three water treatment technologies applied by SWN are the Modular Slow Sand Filtration (MSSF), Limited Mechanisation [LM] and Ultraviolet (UV) systems.
An LM system retrofits an existing borehole with a mechanised pump that draws the water to an overhead tank. From there, it is treated with chlorine and piped to several distribution points in the community.
A MSSF consists of a raw water source that is piped to a storage tank. The water flows by gravity through a tank containing the sand medium which removes bacterial contamination, and then into a treated water tank, then to an onsite kiosk for fetching.
The Ultraviolet (UV) technology uses special lamps or bulbs that emit UV light of a particular wavelength to kill micro-organisms in the water. Raw water is pumped by a submersible pump into raw water storage tanks. It is then pressure-pumped through a sand filter that removes all dirt and other particles from the water. The activated