Water and Irrigation
The vision statement for the water and sanitation sector is Water and Sanitation for all, always. This vision aims to ensure that every community member in Nkhotakota district has equitable access to water and sanitation services for sustainable socio-economic development.
The overall coverage of safe water within 0.5 km in the district is at 53 per cent. Despite large investments in the water supply sector to date, access to safe drinking water is still a problem due to frequent breakdowns, unavailability of spare parts, and lack of trained water committee members to maintain and repair the systems. The effect of these problems is that 32.7 per cent of existing water facilities in Nkhotakota district are not functioning. The large number of water points that are not functioning lead to depriving some of the population who are within a safe water supply of pathogen-free water. Other problems include the degradation of water resources, inadequate financing, increasing water demand as a result of increasing population, insufficient institutional capacity, climate change, inadequate mitigation measures for water related disasters and inadequate promotion of hygiene and sanitation.
There are two community gravity-fed schemes in the district namely the Mwansambo and Dwambazi gravity-fed schemes. The Central Region Water Board (CRWB) provides piped water at the district headquarters and Dwangwa Trading Centre. A total of 80067 households have access to CRWB tap water. Due to rapid, unplanned growth, however, commercial utilities such as CRWB are unable to supply sufficient quantities of good quality water to urban areas of the boma and Dwangwa.
There are a total of 1405 water points in the rural areas of the district. This means that, on average, each village has a safe water point. However, as shown in Figure 4, these water points are not distributed equitably. The expected consequence of unequal distribution of water points is the concentration of the facilities in one area which may lead to depletion of water resources.
The inequitable distribution of water points is further compounded by the fact that there is also a high non-functioning rate of these water points.
The irrigation systems currently employed in the district include motorises pumps treadle pumps, gravity-fed, and surface sprinkler systems. Use of motorised pumps and treadle pumps is the most common, however, gravity-fed irrigation systems combined (seed Table 2.4). Surface sprinkler systems are confirmed mainly to estates in the Dwangwa and Dwambazi areas.
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