Concern as biting water shortage exposes girls to defilers

Shortage of water in parts of Kilifi County has exposed women and girls to risks, particularly sexual attacks while trekking long distances in search of the commodity.

Leaders in Kaya Sub-Location in Magarini have reported cases of girls being defiled. Assistant Chief Shadrack Kazungu said he recently handled three cases of defilement.

He, however, noted that the recent rehabilitation of five boreholes has eased the problem.

“Girls used to take more than two hours looking for water and this exposed them to defilement. Now the problem has eased except for residents of Karimani and Mabonje C who have to hire motorbikes to deliver water to those villages,” he said.

The two areas have experienced the problem in the last 40 years, with villagers paying boda boa riders Sh200 per trip.

Maji Bora Programme has invested about Sh100 million to drill and rehabilitate boreholes and ease the water crisis.

Kaya village resident Loice Katana said women and girls used to walk long distances and buy water at Sh20 per jerrican before the rehabilitation of their borehole.

“The borehole now serves us well after rehabilitation and has saved us time used to look for water elsewhere,” she said.

A village elder Malkia Abdalla said before the rehabilitation, a family could use only a 20-litre jerrican per day because of the difficult of getting the commodity.

“Girls used to leave school early to embark on the journey to fetch water and this also affected their education,” she noted.

Erick Gichana, a director of Griot Consulting Company, said they teamed up with the county government in 2020 to rehabilitate and drill 571 boreholes. The programme has covered Magarini and Ganze among other sub-counties.

He said the five-year programme dubbed Maji Bora, which has been financed to the tune of more than Sh100 million, has been extended to Turkana, Kisumu and Vihiga counties and is set benefit about one million people.

The programme has rehabilitated more than 300 boreholes in Turkana and 150 others in Kisumu and Vihiga.

Gichana noted that 1,021 boreholes have been rehabilitated across the country before the programme moves to Burundi and North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Lake Tanganyika region in Tanzania in the second phase.

“We treat water with chlorine to ensure its safety. However, the challenge is that in some areas, the water table is low and there is salinity. We constantly deploy technicians to repair the pumps whenever they break down,” he noted.

In Narok County, Gichana explained that they have opened a rescue home for girls fleeing from early marriages and female genital mutilation, and are offering scholarships for primary, secondary and tertiary education.

His co-director, Hywel George, noted that the programme was alleviating poverty among rural communities and was an intervention to challenges of climate change.

He said many of the boreholes are hand-pumped and some have solar power installation to improve pumping to large rural populations.

“This is an intervention to improve lives of people living in poverty in the rural Kenya. We will extend our operations to Burundi, DRC and Tanzania under phase two of the programme,” he said.

Kilifi County government has increased water coverage from 65 per cent to 68 per cent in the last two years, marking a significant progress in improving water access.

This has been achieved through an aggressive expansion of water supply infrastructure, including new pipelines, tanks and boreholes.

According to Governor Gideon Mung’aro, the administration and its partners have initiated new projects and upgraded the existing ones in all the seven sub-counties.

However, there is a big deficit as the county receives only 65,000 cubic metres of water per day from the Coast Water Works Development Agency while the demand stands at 265,000 cubic metres per day.

Mung’aro noted that there is an urgent need for further investment in both infrastructure and water production to bridge the gap.