Eritrea faces challenge to keep water flowing

Small nation symbolizes Africa's search for sustained growth and future investment

By MATTHEW GREEN

Reuters News Agency

AKLALET, ERITREA -- In an area where little seems to have changed since Biblical times, engineers armed with laptops are bringing water to tens of thousands of refugees.

The challenge will be to keep the water flowing.

Aid workers in the Red Sea state of Eritrea are facing a dilemma that confronts attempts by foreigners to help countries across Africa: how to make sure projects survive when the foreigners go home.

"It's all very well to provide bags of food and buckets of water and have a doctor jab them in the arm, but nothing's going to stay forever," said Paul de Launay, an Australian water specialist with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"We have to ensure that they can continue and even build on it. That's a very big consideration for us," he said, sweat trickling down his brow in the searing midday sun.

Behind him a generator roars into life, pumping water to the village of Aklalet, where residents use gleaming new taps provided by the UNHCR to help the thousands of refugees returning from neighbouring Sudan to a landscape of arid plains.

By the end of the next year, Mr. de Launay says, he is likely to have moved on to help refugees in another remote corner of the world. But the Eritrean government, like so many in Africa, will have problems filling the void alone.

Using a computer presentation, Mr. de Launay explains that if the government or donors do not take steps to build on the project then 99 per cent of the refugees will have insufficient water or land by 2007, perhaps leaving them worse off than in Sudan.

One thing is certain: On the scorching plains of Eritrea's Gash Barka province, water is precious as gold.

For locals who have in the past simply drawn water in buckets from stagnant pools in dry river beds, there seems no doubt that the project is working.

"There's enough water for us, it's excellent," said 28-year-old Fatima Idriss, filling a jerry can in the middle of the village at a UNHCR tap. "Before we were getting water only from the tanker truck, now you can get it at any time."

In Gash Barka, rivers turn into dust pans during the dry season and rainfall all but ceases.

Aid workers have tapped water from underground rocks, part of a project that will cost the equivalent of $12-million in 2002 to drill boreholes and to set up schools and clinics for the refugees returning after up to 30 years in Sudan.

The problem is that boreholes are not as simple as they look. They can run dry, pumps break down, spares are hard to come by and villagers need to be trained in maintenance.

Africa is littered with projects that failed because they were not suited to their surroundings, but the UNHCR says it is doing all it can to ensure that this one will survive and other donors will continue the work.

Eritrea has a fierce belief in self-reliance forged during a 30-year liberation struggle with Ethiopia, but the fact remains that it has precious few resources to help itself.

The country of 3.7 million typifies many of the problems of states across the continent: war, hunger, strained relations with donors.

European donors have frozen non-humanitarian aid amid concerns over government authoritarianism, while a border war between 1998 and 2000 disrupted farming and devastated the economy.

 The government complains that the West is more than happy to shell out cash to pay for emergency situations when famine or drought hit the television screens while claiming the cupboards are bare when it comes to investing in the future.

Worse still, with the threat of famine looming over vast swathes of southern Africa and with donors preoccupied with Afghanistan, Eritreans say their pleas for help, like many others in less glamorous locations, go unheard.

"In an emergency, donors are interested. But when it comes to support and rehabilitation programs the support is very slow," said Ibrahim Said, director of relief and logistics at the Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission.