The Sunday Mail
Kuda Bwititi
News Editor
On January 4, in Harare’s Glen Norah high-density suburb, the Charge d’Affaires of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Zimbabwe, Mr Cheng Yan, officially handed over to the community three boreholes drilled by China Aid.
As Mr Cheng enthusiastically walked up to the tap and drank water from a glass during the brief handover ceremony, residents erupted into song and dance.
Water is a perennial problem in Zimbabwe’s urban areas due to lack of chemicals to treat water, as well as decayed infrastructure.
Some suburbs in the city have gone for years without clean water.
Residents in areas that receive it, maybe two or three times a week, have to put up with dirty, turgid and unsafe water.
Harare’s water challenges have been exacerbated by lack of access to foreign currency to buy the much-needed water chemicals, maladministration by council and sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by powerful Western countries led by the United States.
As a result, ordinary people are suffering.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that a non-partisan crowd, especially women and children, cheered China’s intervention in Harare during the ceremony.
Spread of the initiative
The three boreholes drilled in Harare are part of over 1 500 that China, through its aid agency — China Aid — has sunk in Zimbabwe in the past 10 years to alleviate the water crisis.
To date, most of the projects have been undertaken in remote rural districts and provinces.
The spread of the initiative to Harare shows the extent of the water poverty the country faces.
Water poverty is usually described as a situation where a nation or region cannot afford the cost of sustainable clean water to all people at all times.
It often worsens the burden women and children face, as they are likely to spend most of their time searching for water.
In the rural areas of Zimbabwe, as in other parts of Africa, at times people compete with animals for water.
China’s assistance to Zimbabwe through the borehole programme is helping in a small but increasingly important way.
An aspect that is yet to be fully examined, however, is how China’s interventions, like the provision of potable water, are improving the well-being of Zimbabweans.
According to the United Nations, “access to water and sanitation are recognised as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity. However, billions of people are still living without safely managed water and sanitation.”
Global leaders have sought to reverse the trend.
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 – part of a number of ambitious targets world leaders set to better human livelihoods – undertakes to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by 2030.
According to United Nations (UN) Water, “Achieving SDG 6 is integral to the success of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which aims to end extreme poverty and protect the planet. Marginalised groups are often overlooked, and sometimes face discrimination, as they try to access the water and sanitation services they need.
“Governments must take a human rights-based approach to water and sanitation improvements, so that no one gets left behind.”
The right to water entitles everyone to have access to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic use.
The right to sanitation entitles everyone to have physical and affordable access to sanitation.
Sanitation also has to be socially and culturally acceptable to ensure privacy and dignity.
UN Water contends: “A water or sanitation service does not serve the whole community if it is too expensive, unreliable, unhygienic, unsafely located, un-adapted for less able groups or children, or non-gender-segregated, in the case of toilets and washing facilities.”
Appropriate technologies
China Aid’s boreholes drilled across the country meet most of these requirements. In addition, the organisation utilised sustainable and appropriate technologies, with the so-called “bush pumps” being used in rural areas, and these have a working life of over 15 years with minimum or no repairs.
The model used in Harare is different, as it uses solar-powered automated pumps that feed storage tanks, and the water is dispensed through taps.
Such simple technologies could have long been replaced with better ones had it not been for the sanctions and other challenges that have constrained Zimbabwe, a mineral-rich country, in its development path.
Currently, local authorities, Government and private homeowners are resorting to these short-term solutions rather than big capital projects.
Meanwhile, China is also assisting Zimbabwe to construct dams, a move that has been considered a panacea to the water challenges.
Kunzvi Dam, which is being built by a Chinese company, will alleviate water problems for over two million residents in Harare.
Chinese companies have been and are currently being involved in dam construction projects. They include the Marovanyati (completed in 2021), Bindura and Gwayi-Shangani dams.
For a developing country like Zimbabwe, access to potable water and food security are critical.
So, China is playing an important role that cannot be ignored.
