Mission in the East

This was my time to explore the eastern part of Burkina while doing a pre-etude pour reseau d’adduction d’eau potable. Thus the main objective of this mission was to do a pre-study of villages who had demanded a water system. As background information, Burkina’s current situation with respect to access to water is quite harsh. In this landlocked country, in most areas woman have to walk for kilometres to reach a pump. Then, using their physical force they fill up their containers and carry them on their head all the way back to their homes. En plus, there is no guarantee that the water is treated and will not cause diseases. In fact, according to the World Health Organization 80% of all diseases in Burkina Faso are caused by unsafe water. So to tackle this problem, our famous multifunctional plateform is also used to install a small system for improved drinking water. But to actually implement a system, there is a whole process that needs to be respected, village submits a demand, if accepted pre-study is done, then feasibility study, then creation of management committee and finally implementation… Assuming all stages of the process go as planned and there is a monitoring that goes along with the steps, the population can eventually have access to drinkable water. I do say ‘assuming’ because there is all sorts of glitches that can happen in each stage and this is what makes development complex. While everything sounds perfect on paper and in theory, the story is otherwise or not as perfect in the field. For example in one village the members of the management committee seemed to be all relatives (sisters, uncles..) of the person responsible for creating the committee!! Or another interesting note was the monitoring staff who don’t get out there in the field often enough to follow the work that is being done. Well, you might think, as I thought, they’re just lazy or irresponsible and a solution could be to fire them and hire hard working individuals. However, as I realized during this week, there are deeper causes for such behaviours. As an explanation for the monitors behaviour listen to the following: In rural areas and outside of larger cities, a common activity for “gang thieves” is to stop cars on the road to obtain cash and their other belongings. Sometimes it can get rough and people might loose their lives because of it. For that it is often recommended not to travel at night and in most offices driving after 6pm for work purposes in not permitted. I further realized that the rate of this activity in the eastern part of Burkina is quite high and the reason why I learned this is because one of the monitoring staff was held by gun point on route during the same time I was in the region. As I listened to her story I could better understand why she and others would be less enthusiastic about getting on the road to do their job. So I learned that poverty has more than one dimension. I can work on a solution that targets poverty in terms of lack of access to drinking water. But in the process of applying the solution, the results can easily be affected by other dimensions of poverty, poverty that encourages young people to point their guns at you.
On the positive side, it was very interesting to visit some villages with MFP installed in them and hear from the women how this project is benefiting their lives. So despite the glitches and the complexity of it all, there is positive change which is encouraging. A +