The Madzi Alipo programme is one of the 9 community based projects run at Fisherman's Rest, Malawi. It is an expanding project that seeks to ensure people living in rural communities have access to quality fresh water. The focus at Fisherman's Rest is not on drilling new boreholes. Instead, the aim is to empower communities by helping them to fix the equipment that they already have and by training them to be able to continue to do this for themselves; this is achieved through onsite training and the Madzi Alipo training school. 

​

The Madzi Alipo project focuses on long-term sustainability with the aim that communities will be equipped to maintain their own water supplies in the future. For each borehole, we survey the location and meet with the community. The community are asked to form a borehole committee of people who will then take responsibility for the pump. The committee contributes to the repair costs of the borehole and are involved in the repair. 

​

From these visits and repairs came the Madzi Alipo App and database, designed to record and collect the data from the field in a timely and efficient manner, as we sought to move away from paper records. The aim was to provide a tool that visualised the water network and catalogued visits to boreholes across Malawi in a user friendly manner, giving the user daily updates on the information.  As the benefits and scope of the database and app became apparent, Fisherman's Rest has sought to coordinate this information with partners across Malawi and internationally.   The database is a tool that can be used to accurately monitor, record and map where each partner is working in the country, avoiding duplication of work and maximising resources.  

​

Fisherman’s Rest is very grateful to our partners, in particular the One Foundation, who are daily changing lives through equipping the communities around us. Over the last year, over 100 pumps have been repaired in the area around Fisherman’s Rest and many more further afield.  We are looking to increase synergy amongst relevant agencies, seeking to rapidly increase the number of pumps repaired and the number of communities trained, with a vision to see water flowing freely across the whole of Malawi.

​

To find out more about the work of Fisherman's Rest, and to get involved in our boarder programmes please visit the following websites:

​

www.fromwales.com

www.fishermansrest.net