When John and Mary Coyne first visited Northern Malawi in spring 2005, they saw that transporting water from streams to one’s village was a feat that required miles of walking every day — a task that usually fell to women and girls — and the water collected often wasn’t safe for drinking.
Struck by this reality, the couple went home to Ireland and spoke to their kids about spending their family’s savings to try to make a difference in this sliver-shaped, landlocked country, among the poorest in the world. The result was Wells for Zoë, an organization that manufactures plastic water pumps for communities to operate and maintain themselves. The pumps allow for easy access to clean drinking water via hand-dug wells, and one pump can supply up to 500 people with clean water for life.
Easy access to safe drinking water is important in and of itself, but its ripple effects can empower communities. Having a well installed in a village allows gardens to flourish, food to grow and people to be healthy and nourished. And because women are typically the ones carrying the burden of transporting water to villages, having a water pump nearby gives them more free time to work and earn money.
“I joined Wells for Zoë to sort out challenges I was facing at home, like lack of food and school fees for my younger sister,” explains Kestina Mphande, the supervisor of an erosion control team in the Mfune area of Northern Malawi. “A lot of things have since changed in my life, because I’m now able to buy food like maize and assist my mother with the groceries.”
About five years ago, Wells for Zoë realized that restoring the hills and fields in the area could further its water-bringing mission. Kevin Dalferth, the organization’s chief technical officer, says the seemingly different projects are connected by a wider mission: “As different as tree planting is from the idea of giving water, it’s actually an extension of the original idea, which is the empowerment of women [so that they] can spend less time on the road carrying things.”
“In the last 15 or 20 years,” he says, “a lot of deforestation has happened, so people are walking further and further away for firewood. We want to restore those landscapes so that people have easier access to their own sustainably grown firewood.”
Wells for Zoë’s reforestation efforts are also about combating soil erosion, which happens when the top layer of soil is worn away by heavy rains or by illegal deforestation to produce charcoal. This can decrease soil fertility and reduce crop yields — and the less money a farmer has, the bigger a problem soil erosion becomes. Inexpensive farmland tends to be found on steep hills that are harder to work, for example, and more susceptible to the life-threatening mudslides that come with heavy rain.
Credit: Source link