Swaziland: Better water management helps thousands

Through Swaziland's National IWRM planning, GWP Swaziland facilitated a grassroots IWRM process to address water resource management challenges in Kalanga, Swaziland. The issues included pollution of water in the community earth dam, deteriorating health because of poor water quality and overexploitation of available water. GWP Swaziland showed villagers how IWRM could deal with these problems and, as a result, the community fenced off the earth dam, built a water trough for animals and drilled boreholes to tap additional reserves. A gardening scheme and sanitary facilities in homesteads further improved the situation. This grassroots IWRM initiative succeeded because GWP Swaziland catalysed support not only from the community, but also from service providers, the private sector and local authorities. More than 9,000 people now benefit from clean water.