Solar pump FOS
2020
Ghana
In the village of Ajuafo in Ghana (also known as Adwafo) are living about 3500 people. To meet their daily need of water, all of them depend on only one electricity-driven and one old manual water pump. Due to the high demand for water and the poor supply, many of the villagers are forced to collect water out of heavily polluted rivers. They have no choice but to either have the children queue at one of the water pumps or to drink polluted river water. This is the reason why many children in the rural areas of Ghana can’t go to school.
However, Ajuafo offers us one excellent opportunity to tackle that problem. There is namely one borehole which currently remains unused cause of the lack of funds to buy an electric water pump and the relatively high cost of the electricity that will be consumed by the pump.
The goal of this project will be to design and install a solar-driven water pump in the currently unused borehole. In combination, we will construct a water tower and multiple water standpipes across the village.This way, by the end of August 2019, the villagers of Ajuafo should have multiple access points to clean running water for which they won’t depend on electricity from the Ghanaian grid. Instead, a water-users-committee will be set up to regularly collect a fair and acceptable fee to maintain the PV-installation and the water pump.
This project is part of an overarching initiative of FOS (North-South organisation of the socialist movement in Flanders, Belgium). In Ghana itself, we will cooperate with the local non-profit organisation COLISO (Community Livelihoods Support Organisation).