Clean Water and Sanitation (Africa)

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2016 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Percy. I thank the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for securing the debate and for speaking so eloquently, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) and the hon. Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods).

I will give two examples from my own experience of why this issue is so important. In 1982, I visited for the first time a country that was then a developing country—Peru. I was in the high Andes and visiting a friend of mine, Philip Archer, who was a doctor with a mission there. For the first part of his service—three or four years—he had been a doctor at a health centre. Time after time, the patients who came through his door had diseases that were caused by poor water or lack of water. For his second period of service, he said, “There is no point in my treating the symptoms; I will treat the cause”, so he ended up becoming a public health educator and putting in water systems to help the people of the high Andes.

My second example is perhaps closer to home. My wife ran a public health education programme in northern Tanzania, Kilimanjaro region, for the Evangelical Lutheran Church Northern diocese. As part of the programme, she and her colleagues also saw the problems caused by poor water—not so much on the mountain, where there was plenty of water, although sanitation was sometimes an issue, but on the plains, in particular among the Masai, and elsewhere. She, too, said, “There’s not much point talking to people about health education when they don’t have water, or if they do, they have to walk several kilometres to it.” The problems that that brings have been eloquently described. Collecting water is usually—almost always— done by women or girls. They suffer attacks from wild animals. We heard of people being killed and very badly hurt by crocodiles when collecting water from rivers and, when walking through the bush, by other wild animals. People are also attacked by humans from time to time—they have to cope with all that as well as missing out on their education or livelihood.

With the help of the Rabobank Foundation of the Netherlands, the northern diocese of the Lutheran Church instituted a programme for drilling shallow wells in various villages. In my view that was done in a very sensible manner—I have to say that because my wife was in charge of the project and she is an extremely sensible person, as were her colleagues. They did it under the guidance of the local community, which, first of all, would come to them and say, “Let’s have a shallow well. We really want one.” They then had to show a sign of commitment, so the idea was that the well would be drilled with money from the Rabobank Foundation and other donations, but the villagers would collect the money for the pump. By doing that, they would assume responsibility for the pump and for its maintenance.

By and large, the programme worked well. I shall be going back to Tanzania later this year and I hope to see some of the wells that were drilled up to 20 years ago—or even longer—still in operation and maintained, with the villagers contributing a set amount each month for the pump’s maintenance. Perhaps they will have replaced the pump in that time with the money that they have accumulated.

To me, the programme spoke of a lot of things: first, of the determination of the people themselves. They wanted clean water and could see the impact on their wives and daughters; the women were the loudest in saying, “We want this.” Secondly, these were not massive programmes. This was not a huge project. It involved a few thousand dollars per village and the villagers themselves were able to collect several hundred dollars for the pump. We are therefore talking about small programmes, the impact of which, as we have seen in the International Development Committee, is sometimes overlooked. However, a great deal can be achieved by running a large number of small village and community-based programmes.

At the same time, sanitation was a clear issue. Public health education was the way to convey the importance of good sanitation, and it did not take a lot of money; this was a public health programme that covered several hundred thousand people yet probably cost only a few cents per person per year. People did not have to be given money; once they were told the importance of putting in more modern sanitation and modern toilets, they did so, because they saw how obvious it was. They heard about the consequences of poor sanitation and poor water and did something about it. I will come on to what I would like to ask the Minister at the end, but I am talking now about a relatively modestly funded programme achieving significant results. The educators, who were trained by my wife and her team, would go out into their community, month in, month out, and encourage people to improve the sanitation in their homes and villages.

My final point is about the link with disease, which has already been made very clear and is completely uncontroversial. If we look at the diarrheal diseases, in particular, and one or two others that are classified among the neglected tropical diseases—I declare an interest as chair of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire also contributes hugely—we see that many of these diseases are directly linked to a lack of water or poor water and a lack of hygiene. I know that DFID has made neglected tropical diseases a key part of its programme from 2011 onwards. Indeed, under the previous Labour Government, a significant sum of £50 million was committed, which was raised to £240 million over five years under the coalition Government. It has been shown that there is a huge payback from work on neglected tropical diseases—something like £30 to £40 for every £1 invested.

Will the Minister commit, first, to look at the whole area of water and sanitation and see what more can be done? This is a very basic thing. I saw the impact at first hand 35 years ago, yet we are still talking about it. Let us do more.

Secondly, let us do it in a smart way. There are so many programmes around the world. Water Aid is a fantastic organisation that has contributed to many of them, but there are so many programmes that are not big and which perhaps go under the radar. Let us see how we can support them as a country. We may have to go through a larger organisation to do so, but let us ask how we can do more than we are doing at the moment. Let us not hear colleagues come to us and say, “Well, I’ve got a link in my constituency to a water project in Africa, but I cannot get DFID to support it because it is too small.” Excellent programmes such as Aid Match and Aid Direct have made a real impact in this area, but let us make water programmes a priority; they are ideal and they very much fit into that category of spending.

Thirdly, let us look at how we can support health education programmes, which, again, are often fairly low-key but incredibly effective. They can be run through government, faith groups, Churches and community organisations and are often low-cost, involving amounts of money that do not appear on DFID’s radar. There must be ways of ensuring that these programmes are supported, either though some kind of match funding or direct funding, or even possibly, as we have suggested in our Committee, by making funds available to local DFID offices for support, without people having to go through the centre, with the time and effort that that involves.

Finally, I emphasise again the importance of continuing to support neglected tropical diseases alongside the work on WASH—water, sanitation and hygiene. In fact, WASH projects and NTD projects should go together. Even though providing medicines to schoolchildren to get rid of worms is excellent, there is little point in doing that year after year when those children will get worms back immediately because the water is poor. Let us have the two kinds of projects going hand in hand. As the current programmes come to an end and the Department considers the future funding of neglected tropical diseases, I urge the Minister to consider the huge value for money that those programmes provide.

Thank you for chairing the debate, Mr Percy, and I thank the hon. Member for Strangford for securing it.