LUSAKA, Sept 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Dorothy Zulu’s dream is to have a water tap and a small vegetable garden in her home in Ngombe, one of many slums in Zambia’s capital Lusaka.
To get water Zulu, a mother of six, has to be at one of the dozens of water kiosks dotted round the dusty neighbourhood by 6 a.m.
“You have to wake up early because by 10 a.m. there is no water left,” Zulu, 54, said while washing her laundry in the murky waters of a shallow stream running through Ngombe.
Zulu survives on 10 kwacha ($1) a day and, like the majority of Ngombe’s 120,000 residents, spends up to a third of it on water.
“If you don’t have money here you can’t drink water,” Zulu told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Overall, the proportion of people in Zambia with access to clean water has increased since 1990. But in urban areas it has dropped to 85 percent in 2012 from 89 percent in 1990.
With Zambia’s population forecast to grow five-fold or more by 2100, experts expect the southern African country will struggle to meet the demand for water, especially in urban areas where population growth is expected to be fastest.
To achieve universal access to clean water and sanitation by 2030, one of the development targets global leaders are due to adopt at a U.N. summit later this month, Zambia will have to provide water to all, including those living in slums.
It will also need to focus on repairing and expanding its dilapidated infrastructure, water experts say.
“The lack of access to water in informal settlements is a global issue which reflects a broader pattern of discrimination and inequality in the world,” Catarina de Albuquerque, executive chair of the global partnership organisation Sanitation and Water for All, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“The underlying idea of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) is that no goal should be considered as met unless it is met for all economic and social groups, including the people in the slum.”
Only about 36 percent of Lusaka’s more than two million residents have piped water in their homes, according to Zambia’s National Water Supply and Sanitation Council (NWASCO).
Only half of Ngombe’s residents have access to clean water, according to Brian Chanda, plant superintendent at Ngombe Water Trust, a community group which manages the slum’s water supply.
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The rest rely on often contaminated shallow wells, private boreholes or vendors who sell water at a 50 percent markup from the tariff set by the Ngombe Water Trust.
