Jacana opens a new office in Lundazi

We are starting a new three-year water project, sponsored by Marie-Stella-Maris, and a lot is involved.
Basically it will be a copy-paste story and it should be easy with the experience we have gained in Chipata, but we can’t get away with it that easily. The bridge to Lundazi has collapsed and it takes us an extra hour of bumping along a sandy road to get there. We are dealing with two districts, Lundazi and Chasefu, some 187 km from Chipata. Chasefu is still a young district and was part of the Lundazi district until 2018. Two districts means two local authorities, two district water authorities, two Chiefs, two project areas and so on.

We have decided to open our new office in Lundazi “town”. Lundazi is the center of the two districts. It has around 20,000 inhabitants, but is expanding rapidly.
After a short search, we found two small houses on a fairly large walled plot close to the center of Lundazi town. One house serves as an office and the other serves as Jacana’s base for staff. At the moment we are building a simple structure on site, where we will provide the three-week technical training and possibly other training courses later. There is also enough space to manually drill boreholes during training.

 

Before we started, we introduced the program to the local authorities and they approved. Everyone we speak to is very enthusiastic and extremely helpful because water is a serious problem in this area.

In the month of February we started looking for drillers and welders. Interviews were held with 13 welders and 31 drillers. Everyone was asked about the motivation and how they think they can expand their existing business with the new knowledge they will gain in business and technical training. In the end, 12 welders and 13 drillers were invited for the three-day business, financial and marketing training.

This training was given in the first three weeks of March by our local trainers Bester and Pious. During the training the most promising and motivated drillers and welders were chosen for the technical training.

The technical training starts on 15 April
with the training of 4 welders. Henk Holtslag from the Netherlands will train them in the first week how to make drill sets. After that they will be trained by Brighton Kaniki from Malawi in how to produce rope pumps. During these two or three weeks, Gideon Phiri from Chipata, will be trained as a trainer in producing drilling sets and rope pumps.

The training of 8 drillers in manual drilling of boreholes according to the SHIPO and Mzuzu method starts on 23 April. They use the drill sets made by the local welders a week earlier. Hastings Mbewe and Moses Banda from Chipata will provide the training under the supervision of Laban Kaduma from Tanzania.
After this technical training, Jacana hopes that the three potential technical trainers from Chipata are experienced enough to independently provide training in the future.
After the training, the drillers and welders can work under the supervision of experienced drillers and a welder from Chipata. Boreholes will be drilled and pumps installed at the workshops of the welders and the houses of the drillers. These will serve as promotional material to attract customers.
In Lundazi we also want to start working on Self-supply, so that customers can go directly to the welders and/or drillers for a borehole with pump. But we are not there yet, first we want to train the welders and the drillers and introduce the project in the two project areas Katandala and Kasongolo and make a start with the Show case area. More about that in a later newsletter.