Hand-pump or mechanised?

A controversy occurred after the mechanised borehole in Aframano was installed, and it raised an important question for me:

Why are we providing a mechanised borehole, instead of a manual (hand-pumped) one?

Manual is better?

The manual pump seems to have several advantages. It is cheaper to install. More importantly, it is cheaper to maintain. The village will still have to sell the water in order to have a fund to maintain the borehole, but presumably the repairs will cost much less, so the water committee can sell the water more cheaply.

But the mechanised borehole has some advantages. In spite of being more complex machinery, it is less prone to failure, because it is not vulnerable to the vigorous treatment that the manual one gets. Children especially tend to be rough with the manual pumps. Also, if the underground water source has great capacity (like the Aframano one, which can deliver 65 litres per minute), this can be more easily exploited by an electric pump than by manual pumping. This means that it can serve many more people, and benefit from economies of scale. The Aframano borehole serves not only Aframano village, but also many communities that live within bike or motorbike distance.

But it seems everyone
wants mechanised

These are the reasons that our operations manager Nicholas is very convinced that the mechanised borehole is better. I've asked many people, and I have found that opinion is really divided. When I visited my niece Natasha in Zimbabwe, she introduced me to an engineer called Trevor working on a road bridge project. We gave him a lift from the bridge back into Harare. On the journey I told him about the issue in Aframano, and asked his opinion about mechanised versus manual. He said that in Zimbabwe they always put a manual pump for a community. They only use mechanised boreholes where there is a well-defined organisation (such as a school or clinic) that can manage it. He pointed out a community borehole as we drove past, and we stopped to look at it. There were many people waiting to use it, and I could see it was free. He said it is probably maintained by the local council.

After that experience, I was really wondering if we had made a mistake in Aframano, but since then I've seen lots of evidence that, for reasons I still don't fully understand, the mechanised borehole is considered much better in Ashanti. Here is what I have observed:

• In Amangoase village, Ashanti Development had provided a manual borehole in 2011. In January 2020, I went with Penny to visit again. We spoke to Ama Serwaah, who had been Unit Committee chairperson for many years but has recently had a stoke. She has stood down as chair, but is still active in the village. She told us that they had decided to sell the water at the usual price -- 20 GHp per 20 litre can -- and during the period 2011 to 2018 they had collected a fund large enough to mechanise the borehole. They completed that in 2018. This suggests that communities want mechanised boreholes.
• The same thing has happened in Dida. Ashanti Development installed a manual borehole in 2007, and the community mechanised it in 2018 using funds collected by selling the water. The price there is also 20 GHp per 20 litre can.
• In Pepeasi Saviour village, they have a privately-run mechanised borehole. The price is the standard one for this region (20 GHp for a 20 litre jerrycan). I asked villagers whether this was affordable. I was told most people bought water, but some did not and continued to use a stream. I asked how many? "80 percent buy it, 20 percent cannot afford it", I was told, in a surprisingly clear answer. I admit that 20 percent not being to afford it seems a lot,  but it isn't clear that a manual borehole would be cheaper because it would necessarily have fewer customers and therefore reduced economy of scale.

Why not solar?

Wouldn't solar power be a good solution, asked Nicholas, our operations manager. It would have much lower running costs (no fuel, but still some funds would be required for repairs). Solar panels are becoming much cheaper, and Ghana has no shortage of sunlight. I don't think we would even need batteries to store the electricity; the pump could be run during day time.

Future solar engineers

Nicholas agreed that this is a good way to go, but he argued that there is not enough solar power expertise in Ghana. When the equipment goes wrong, it will be expensive to do repairs, and the village concerned might have to wait a long time before an engineer can come. The engineers would have to come from Accra, and it might be difficult to persuade them to come to a remote village if they have easier and more lucrative work in the city.

Hmmm. But solar is the way to go. The whole world is moving away from fossil fuels, towards renewable energy. If Ghana needs more solar power engineers, we need to solve that problem. Perhaps it's a career opportunity for the huge number of enthusiastic, optimistic, inspiring, hardworking children in this region.