“In the abundance of flowing flood water, some communities continue to suffer and starve for portable water.” Kamasungu Brewah is a Library Studies student. He explained that every year, Sierra Leone experiences four months of rainfall, but nothing is being done to properly educate communities on water harvesting and the Guma Valley Water Company is complacent over the issue on how to properly plan to salvage the age old challenge of the annual water crisis. He suggested that the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education should endeavor to get water experts to visit schools and communities about the benefits of water harvesting during the rains.
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On the issue of Guma Valley being complacent, Brewah said, “Each time you hear on the news about loans and grants given to the water service provider for rehabilitation to improve on water distribution to the city, but successive administrations never thought about planning for expansion and making use of excess water during the rains.” He furthered that water engineering experts are not being proactive, by not thinking aloud that such amount of excess water should be harvested and treated to provide clean, safe portable water to the public. A retired secretary who worked at the Guma Valley for over two decades, noted since Guma Valley was established, it was to serve a city of about 600,000 but today Freetown has over two million residents. Proper surveys and planning should have been carried out to make room for expansion including real time water distribution to Freetonians. “Most service providers take the people for granted. People pay for inadequate services and when some of us complain; our voices are not heard.” An engineer noted that universities need to re-arrange course curricula in order to train more professional experts in water engineering. “We need to get it right to move forward and I think it’s the responsibility of our education sector to change the narrative,” he said.
AC/7/8/19
By Ade Campbell
Thursday August 08, 2019.
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