One of the United Nation’s key Millennial Development Goals is to halve the number of people who have no access to sustainable supply by 2015. This will require a tripling of the current rate at which people gain access to water. In Zambia in the rural regions of low rainfall and few public utilities, people are dependent on hand pumping water from wells and bore holes that are often remote from their homes and fields and frequently contaminated. The work of schools, orphanages and clinics is limited by the absence of reliable water supplies. The cultivation of subsistence crops is discouraged or restricted by the lack of irrigation.
The Estelle Trust’s water aid programme is based on the provision of wind or solar powered water supplies to community projects such as schools, orphanages, and re-settlement villages. The Trust provided funds for the establishment of a workshop at Fringilla that manufactures and installs the Poldaw wind pump – a British designed pump that can be locally and economically manufactured and maintained. The programme also uses solar pumps where these are more suitable to the local conditions.
With the help of a substantial financial contribution from Chapman Freeborn Aviation (see “Partners”), over the last three years the Trust has arranged and funded water supply installations at community projects run by – among others – the National Agenda for Social Advancement, the Holy Rosary Sisters, All Kids Can Learn, Fighting Poverty in Zambia, and Kutemwa ndi Kusalema Ministeries.
Windpumps are fabricated at a factory in Fringilla
