What a difference a tap makes. One with fresh, clean water splashing out of it.
To grasp the scale of that difference, take two villages: two villages not so far from one another, outside Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar.
In the first, Ambohimanatrika, there’s no piped water. Instead, the people have to scramble down steep slopes to fetch dirty water from a couple of hand-dug wells. Lying below the village, these receive the run-off from all the animal and human waste trickling down from above – few people have toilets, so defecating in the open remains the norm.
The residents of the village have done their best to protect their water sources, but there’s no escaping the effects of relying on such a polluted source, and these are all too plain to see, says WaterAid’s Laura Summerton. “I’ve never been in a community where the kids were so sick,” she says. And without clean water on tap, it’s hard to maintain basic standards of hygiene, she adds. “It’s fine to tell people to wash their hands, but if that means going all the way down to the pond to fill the bucket again with dirty water, it’s understandable if it’s not considered a priority.”
It’s a view echoed by Ernest Randriarimalala, WaterAid Madagascar’s Voices from the Field officer. He is a local man, and knows both villages well. “The kids [in Ambohimanatrika] are brilliant, but they’re also really dirty,” he says. “You can see it on their hands, faces and necks, unfortunately.”
The contrast with the village of Tsarafangitra is striking. Set in the deep countryside to the east, it is even more remote. Its people are mostly subsistence farmers, with less access to markets than those in Ambohimanatrika. But their one great advantage is clean, fresh water. Thanks to a project completed by WaterAid in 2017, there’s a new toilet block next to the school, along with washing facilities, while five tap stands line the village street. These are surrounded by little wooden fences, inside which herbs and flowers have been planted.
“I’ve known this village since [before the water came],” says Randriarimalala, “and their situation was just as bad as Ambohimanatrika. But now things have changed in so many amazing ways. First, people are so much healthier, [especially] the kids. And second, they save so much time. They used to spend two or even three hours, each and every day, just collecting water. Now they can use that time to do so many other things, like growing vegetables in a little garden near their home. That means they can have fresh food, even in the dry season. It’s such a bonus for them in terms of both food security and health.”
Among those who have benefited is Albert Rakotoson. Now 67, he has lived in the village all his life. “Before [we had the taps], the water was dirty,” he says. “And it used to take 30 minutes to [fetch it] – a one-kilometre round trip. You had to go downhill first and then back up. It wasn’t all that steep, but it was enough to make your heart race afterwards. And when it was wet, it was very slippery. When I was young I was always sick because I drank really dirty water. And I thought I always would be. I never even thought about having clean water. I couldn’t imagine such a thing.”
“Even people’s appearance is different now – they look so healthy and clean,” says Randriarimalala.
Village life itself is becoming more attractive, too, according to WaterAid’s local project officer, Jacob Ramifehiarivo. “There’s quite a trend in Madagascar of people from rural areas going to the city to look for improvement in their lives,” he says, “and one of the reasons is to have easier access to clean water and electricity. But if you can bring these to them instead, they are more inclined to stay in their home community.”
Such benefits should soon come to Ambohimanatrika, too. Working with the local water utility and the people themselves, WaterAid is developing a scheme to pipe water from two local lakes, via a treatment plant, to bring it to tap stands in the village, as well as to a neighbourhood school and health centre. There will be sanitation blocks, too, and WaterAid will introduce more hygiene training, using animation made by local animators to encourage people to adopt the sort of good practice – such as handwashing – that can so easily seem pointless when clean water isn’t available.
Pauline, the head teacher at Tsarafangitra’s school, has seen the transformation in the health of the children in her charge, and says that these benefits can’t be underestimated. “It’s very emotional that we have clean water so close by,” she says. “It has just [brought] immense happiness to us.”
WaterAid has teamed up with Fujifilm to document life in villages in Madagascar. They’re helping Malagasy children tell their own stories by giving them cameras to document their daily lives, as part of the Access Denied appeal. The results are captured in a beautiful book, Madagascar in the frame, and an exhibition open until the end of January at London’s Fujifilm House of Photography. Click here to find out more.
Since 2012, Fujifilm has donated a total of more than £525,000 to support WaterAid’s work around the globe.
