Water Aid: Providing clean water to communities

Feedback Madagascar works to ensure that all communities have access to clean water, their water supply work is concentrated on providing boreholes, installed with handpumps, using a hand-drilling technique called rotasludge. Feedback Madagascar now has two teams of well-drillers. Their current supporters are Fresh20 and the Eagle Foundation but they are desperately in need of funding to keep the work going. Action is centred around the promotion of the three main WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) messages, essential in reducing diarrhoel disease. Diarrhoeal diseases are still a major cause of sickness and death in Madagascar, and this is largely due to drinking dirty or contaminated water.

Many rural communities have experienced decreases in disease and sickness because of the work with the provision of drinking water systems, and through educational programmes related to the prevention of diarrhoel disease. Some villages have been supplied with gravitational water supply systems and hand pumps. Since Feedback Madagascar started working with HIP, in December 2007 community health educators have been trained in communication techniques to promote behaviour change related to water, sanitation and hygiene. Local masons have also been trained to build hygienic cement latrines using the ‘sanplat’ model.