Madina

Whilst in Sierra Leone in 2013, we visited the Paramount Chief for the Tonka Limba district who lives in Madina. Madina is the district town and has a population of around 4000 people. This however swells by hundreds every week when they hold a market. Whilst there, Paramount Chief Kelso Foro Bomborai the Third pleaded for us to help his people in Madina get access to clean drinking water. The town is near a swamp with a bore hole, pipes and generators installed, however the funding which provided this infrastructure didn’t stretch to making the project sustainable by providing a means of powering the generators. For several years, the system as been mostly useless and slowly the people of the town had returned to collecting dirty water from the top of the swamp and nearby rivers. The Paramount chief asked for us to provide diesel for the generators which would pump water to the water tower in the town. The water is then gravity fed to   spread throughout the town where the people have access to it. We are currently providing enough diesel to give people access to water for 4 hours per day, 3 days per week at a cost of £30 per week. The majority of this has been funded by people willing to give a regular donation of £5, £10 or £20 per month.

Before we leave this district and start providing wells for villages in other areas, we have one final project the committee have decided to undertake. We are currently fundraising around £10,000 to buy solar panels to power the generators, which would allow us to focus the money we currently put aside for the diesel on other projects, as well as making the Madina project sustainable for the town in the long term.

 

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