The Age of the Handpump Should Be Over (But Isn't)

Alison Wedgwood CEO/Co Founder of eWATER Services Briefing Paper No2

Summary: With Covid making imperative the need for hygiene: handwashing and girls education raised to the top of the agenda in 2021 is it reasonable to accept that girls walking 500 meters carrying 20kg of water to and from hand pumps is a “basic need met”? It is time to harness low cost solar pumping, smart technology, pre-payment taps within 30 meters of everyone's home to guarantee responsive maintenance and 24/7 water access appropriate for the 21st century. 

SDG 6.1 hopes “By 2030, to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all, ” but deep diving into that definition  to SDG6.1.1. reveals that safe access to affordable drinking water means   “a total collection time of 30 minutes or less for a round trip, including queuing, using the travel modes of walking or pedalling. As a proxy, project developers may measure this as a distance of 250 m or less from the households”  from the home” (UNDP). Is it acceptable that a young  girl will have to carry a huge 20 kg bucket or jerry can of water, for 30 minutes, over 500 meters, and this actually meets conventional UN and WHO standards for accessible water?  She will probably be kept off school, and have to do six or seven round trips a day but SDG6 will have been achieved.  

In a post Covid world what is abundantly clear is that people everywhere need more clean water, close by, easy to access and that the 30 minute round trip rule for basic water access feels outdated.  How was this rule created? Many major influencers in the water sector still cannot stop their fascination with the handpump as the global solution to ending water poverty and  the handpump often means 30 minute round trips.   Normally only 1 or two handpumps are ever installed in a village, that is a big tick, everyone has “access to water” and the donor can move the wagons on to the next village.  The handpump is probably locked up for hours each day whilst the women and girls wait for the attendant to get back from the fields,  he’s got no watch so could be hours, some houses are certainly more than 30 minutes round trip away, but who’s going to walk the walk and really check that the round trip was only 30 minutes?

Hand pumps used to be great, the workhorses of developing countries’ water supply programmes. The India Mark 2 and then the Afridev were first used in the 1970’s  - that’s 50 years ago – at that time there were no mobile phones, computers, no IOT, no solar pumps. It was a different age. Over 5 million were installed, and now 3 million are broken.  It is extremely difficult to walk around an African village and not find a disused, broken handpump sitting littering the landscape with their ugly rusting metal and decaying concrete stand trapping plastic and litter in the broken soak away.  All the efforts to improve the design, provide toolkits, do “village level operation and maintenance have failed”. So why are millions of dollars still spent installing them? Around 60,000 handpumps are still installed across sub-Saharan Africa every year, funded by international donors,  even though typically 40% break within 18 months and fixing them is hard… “ For 1.3 billion people living in rural areas, hand pumps are the preferred technology, as they can lift widely available and good quality groundwater at low cost” said UNICEF in 2019, singing the praises of handpumps, although bizarrely  in the next paragraph it accepted that 40% break within 2 years of installation. 

Photo: Another day not at school, a locked handpump, a contaminated plastic funnel, business as usual.

There have been some useful innovations to improve handpumps - millions of dollars have been invested in smart IOT sensors to monitor flow rates in handpumps. The water point transmitter monitors the movement of the handle of the pump to estimate water usage and sends the data vis SMS to a dashboard. This technology provides a useful tool in telling operators their systems are broken, and can undoubtedly improve sustainability when combined with professional water operators with enough funding to send out mechanics when problems occur. There have been noticeable reductions in breakdowns where smart handpumps are combined with well-funded responsive maintenance programmes such as FundiFix in Kenya but these are still the exceptions.

As the graph below from a renowned NGO demonstrates, 50%  of the handpumps installed in over 300 villages are currently “low use,” “ no use,”  “offline” or “under repair”  - ie not working. This large NGO successfully raises millions of dollars from well-meaning corporations and film stars but even cursory examination of the data suggests a different approach might be wise?

Smart Handpump Dashboard Live Data – December 2020, Large NGO

Hand pumps also have a few major design flaws. It is quite staggering that after 40 years of using the same design, neither the India Mark 2 or Afridev designers have made a water spout that actually fits Africa’s ubiquitous jerry can. This means time and time again, contaminated pieces of plastic are unsafely shoved onto the nozzle of a hand pump;  dirty, makeshift plastic funnels attached to the end of a hand pump appear incongruously on web site of IOT Smart Sensors without any sense of irony

 The IOT  Smart Sensor Inside the Handpump Sits Incongruously With The Contaminated Plastic Spout

So back to the key question, why are 40% of handpumps always broken?  Regardless of the billions spent training local water committees in handpump maintenance and handing out millions of toolkits that quietly disappear, the fact is that handpumps are not that easy to repair. The rods deep down in the borehole often need maintenance, it is heavy lifting and technical to do; (RWSN various papers 2016-2019), the flanges on the India Mark 2 are under continuous pumping strain and often snap off. Most handpumps are manufactured in India where “quality controls are not always enforced and poor-grade recycled metal is used, meaning parts break more easily.  Installing them correctly is also difficult and if they are placed on hand dug wells, not deep boreholes they often fail in the dry season”. Knowing a hand pump is broken is one thing, but without a responsive and paid for, locally run maintenance service a sensor is...just a sensor. Who pays for the broken hand pump when it is broken? 

Solar panels and solar pumps have dropped in price by 80% over the last 10 years. Where the hydro geology makes sense, is it not better to harness renewable energy, use that same professionally drilled borehole that would normally have a hand pump on, pump water up to an overhead tank and install 20 taps instead of one handpump?   World Health Organisation (2017) research shows that ‘the quantities of water collected and used by households are primarily a function of the distance to the water supply or total collection time required’.  

If there are 20 taps scattered around a village, girls only have to walk 30 metres not 500 meters and instead of pumping the awkward handle themselves, they can use the sunlight’s energy to haul the water up from the deep hole in the ground.  A definite improvement for the girl asked with fetching the water, but still the big elephant in the SDG6 room has not been addressed. That is the same for handpumps or solar powered pumps, someone has to pay for the maintenance and do it. Who manages the labour, organises the transport,  supervises the tools? How does anyone know who has done what, when and who has been paid? Reliance on “village committees” to maintain handpumps has failed, the 30 years of evidence is clear, collecting small amounts of cash from handpump attendants is tricky. It is certainly not an option for multi tap solar schemes.  The cycle of failing operation and maintenance can only be solved by people paying  affordable user fees, around $5 per person per year to professional, locally accountable water operators to guarantee reliable access to water.   

The Future for SDG6: Smart ATMs Within 30 Metres of Every Home

The final piece of the SDG6 jigsaw is the leapfrog to using smart solar powered pre-payment systems (or ATMs) on rural and peri-urban communal taps. Already serving hundreds of thousands of consumers in rural areas of Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Gambia the concept of smart pre-payment for the poorest people in Africa is beyond pilot, with a range of providers now out there battling to be heard above the noise of the 60,000 handpumps and "our plan is for "community" to run the O&M of this hundred thousand dollar bore hole, honestly they're so good at it" being financed again and again. The age of the handpump is over; the future is easy access to water credit through mobile money, or even a  distant relative buying credit for a rural family’s water card, thus allowing enough funding to be collected completely transparently, for professional responsive maintenance to finally take place. 

The big donors and influencers who create glossy CSR reports for private companies, the Water Ministries and Regional Water Authorities and NGOs are very slowly starting to realise that a sustainable solution to the water supply problem that kills 400,000 children each year is obvious. It is time to evoke change against the SDG propaganda of outdated ‘solutions’ and glossy photographs of smiling children using handpumps because behind that smile is a broken down 50 year old piece of manual machinery and a girl knowing full well she is not going to school.