World Water Day - Spotlight on Biliqo Bulesa

A girl fetching water at the Dima Ado water kiosk

This World Water Day- March 22- we look at Biliqo community’s turning point to accessing clean and safe drinking water.

Biliqo is a small but growing town in the arid and semi-arid lands of Isiolo County. From its inception in the late 1980’s, the communities here have never had clean water.

Up until recently, residents - often women and girls - have had three options for fetching household water, none of them ideal. They could either trek five kilometres to fetch water at the Ewaso Ngiro river (this river water can trigger diarrhoea and other health problems), rely on highly saline water from a borehole drilled in the area, or walk six kilometres to fetch safe drinking water in the nearby Dima Ado centre, for which they have to pay a small fee.

The majority of the population in Biliqo rely on livestock to generate income, and finding reliable water for their animals is another ongoing challenge.

As the population in Biliqo and the surrounding areas grows, the challenges around water are only getting worse.

Biliqo town

That is why the Biliqo Bulesa Community Conservancy partnered with NRT and the Government of Sweden (through the IMARA programme) to provide the community at Biliqo with an alternative source of clean water.

Now, 500 households and the Biliqo Health Centre have access to clean water for the first time.

Guyo Sora, Biliqo resident at the water pumping station

A pre-existing investment had been made for water abstraction from the Ewaso river for Biliqo, but had never been fully utilised.

“What this project looked at was to collect clean water into a storage tank that goes back for use within Biliqo centre through the already existing structure,” says Odupoi Kuraru, NRT’s Senior Water Engineer.

Now complete, the shallow wells supply clean water to the Biliqo Dispensary through solar-powered pumps, which help to fill two 10,000 litre storage tanks. These ensure clean water for the new maternity wing and the rest of the facility. About 70,000 litres of water are pumped daily through an extended pipe for redistribution through the normal supply system, serving about 500 households with an average of six people.

The wells yield approximately 8,000 litres of water per hour.

A visit by the IMARA secretariat to the water pumping station

The overall aim of NRT’s water programme is to ensure water investments are planned holistically, address community priorities, take into account social and environmental considerations and build conservancy level governance and management capacity.

“We’re working with communities in conservancies to design simple projects to supply safe water through harvesting rainwater and providing storage be it sand dams, rock catchments, gravity schemes in highlands, shallow wells and boreholes,” adds Odupoi.

Conservancies in collaboration with existing community water governing bodies help in strengthening water governance to ensure good water use and management.

NRT with support from the Government of Sweden, USAID, European Union, German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) have rolled out several water projects in conservancies indended to supply water to communities, wildlife, rangers, institutions (schools, health facilities) and livelihoods projects such as tourism facilities which then earn revenue to support communities with employment and education bursaries.

Globally, 2.2 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water.

Water access is critical to the success of so many conservancy programmes - wildlife conservation, livestock, livelihoods development (schools and health centres), tourism, peace (resource-based conflict reduction), security (ranger outposts) - that despite the programme being relatively new it has received exceptional support from both existing and new partners.

Water storage tanks mounted to supply clean water to the Biliqo dispensary