Hope in Despair

How old are you?

Me? My age? Mmmm, I can’t remember,

When did you come to Mtandire?

Iiiiiiiiii, I don’t know. It’s long time ago. Government sent us here from, eerh, Maula!

Tafwaule Nkhambule looks frail. She cannot recall her past, mumbles her name and forgot her age. Only her grey hair and wrinkled skin reveal how long she has lived.

She lives in the slums of Mtandire in Lilongwe. She says back then, the settlement was sparsely populated and united.

She says communities would donate labour towards development schemes like constructing classrooms and repairing footpaths, roads and bridges. But with years folding and the population swelling, the united society split and collective self-help initiatives faded.

“The road up there has no drains. They were sealed a long time ago. Rainwater bursts and floods our houses. It forms a dam here,” says Nkhambule pointing at a ditch.

“Rainwater troubles us every year but we have no means to control the situation. We only try to protect ourselves, the children and our properties.”

Nkhambule’s house lies on a sloppy terrain. Between it and her neighbour’s compound is a water-made gully, half buried with debris. She says rainwater deposits refuse which rots and stinks along the gully.

Each rainy season disrupts the routine in Mtandire. Annually, poor drainage leads water into people’s homes, threatening to arc houses down, leaving neighbourhoods vulnerable and desolate.

Over 150 households lie along either side of road drains. Water gushing down compounds exposes neighbourhoods to panic. Roads become muddy rendering travel impractical. Children fail to leave for school, adults abstain from businesses.

The township’s usual glee is soaked in the untamed waters. Noise from carpenters, tinsmiths and welders is muted.

Since collective self-help initiatives ebbed, roads remain unrepaired; bridges tattered and drains sealed. Water flows perilously, eroding roads, forming gullies and dumping debris in neighbourhoods.

While nobody traces threads that wove society together, the Centre for Community Organisation and Development (Ccode) is stringing the settlement into one fabric again.

Nkhambules explaining challenges the community faces with rainwater

Ccode wants communities to identify and solve their problems.

With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the Lilongwe City Council, the organisation is implementing a K97million project to upgrade roads, construct water kiosks, build water drains, and repair bridges in slums of Mtandire and Chinsapo.

Despite being kilometres apart, both Mtandire and Chinsapo are high density slum areas with roads disturbingly networked, dusty and potholed.

Houses here are predominantly two-roomed, built with adobe bricks and mud mortar. The ratio of iron-roofed and grass-thatched almost tallies. Accommodation rates rank amongst the cheapest, attracting incalculable numbers of the urban poor.

Swelling populations insert pressure on social amenities. Yet, social facilities shrink in either capacity or quantity leading to poor sanitation and shortage of clean potable water.

Poor sanitation and lack of clean water are what ONE, a global movement fighting injustices of extreme poverty, says are leading causes of child mortality claiming an average 2,000 lives through diarrhoeal infections daily.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) recently reported that Malawi had met access to safe water and basic sanitation by 2010.

But the report is but a mockery of the situation in Mtandire and Chinsapo where over 150 households drink from one kiosk. By design, each kiosk has four taps. However, only one works. The others were either stolen or deliberately closed to preserve water pressure.

Since they are in the open, the kiosks – which are also in stinky surroundings – are closed when it rains. Users turn to rain water, exposing themselves to waterborne diseases.

Women and girls have been the worst victims of the situation. They hoof long distances looking for the liquid, eating into work or school time.

Besides water and sanitation issues, accessing a house in Chinsapo or Mtandire is dreary. One has to weave through clumpy houses, zigzagging through pubs, churches and video showrooms. Pavements are webbed, roads bumpy and dusty.

Group Village Headman (GVH) Banda of Chinsapo said the state of roads in his area is hampering development activities.

“In our daily lives we need to eat but accessing Admarc [Agriculture Development Marketing Corporation] is hard because of poor and impassable roads. It’s even harder to find transport when somebody is sick or during death,” he said.

Ccode Assistant Project Manager Gerald Chihana says once the informal settlement upgrading works complete, the two townships will have better roads and improved sanitary conditions and access to clean water.

“We expect the upgraded roads to improve drainage systems such that water will no longer flood neighbourhoods or dump debris in people’s compounds,” said Chihana.

Nkhambule shared Chihana’s expectations. The drainage will cushion the neighbourhoods from destructive runoffs. Children will go to school even after heavy downpours. Water sources will also be convenient and protected.

This should drive the MDG target of universal access to safe water and basic sanitation whose benefits go beyond health sector.

ONE estimates that meeting this target would reduce child deaths by 203,000; enhance school days by 270 million and help sub-Sahara African governments save about 12 percent of their annual public health expenditure.

In the immediate, the benefit of the Ccode project is that it is tapping local human resource, not voluntarily but on wage. Each pockets K800 per day, more than double the recommended daily wage of K371.

For people of Mtandire and Chinsapo to maximise utility of the K97million package, they ought to look at how their society was knifed apart, neglected.