Water and Sanitation in Malawi

EWB volunteer Brett Stevenson is in Blantyre, Malawi’s biggest city and commercial centre.

Brett works in partnership with Concern Universal, a non-governmental organisation that works to alleviate poverty in rural communities. In Malawi, Concern Universal’s work promotes strong sustainable livelihoods, micro-credit, and water and sanitation projects. Brett is working as part of CU’s Water and Environmental Sanitation team.

The team focuses on Malawi’s rural areas, where over 80% of the population lives. Approximately 40% of people in these areas lack safe water, and more than 70% lack adequate sanitation facilities. Concern Universal takes an integrated approach to addressing health in rural communities, through the provision of water and sanitation facilities, and the promotion of proper hygiene practices.

Concern Universal works in collaboration with communities and government to promote, support and maintain locally appropriate water and sanitation systems. By investing in these partnerships, Concern Universal is building capacity and ownership at the local level and increasing the sustainability of their projects.

EWB’s Role:

Concern Universal has an excellent reputation in the water and sanitation sector for their cost-effective, yet thorough and thoughtful implementation approach. Through extensive experience and continual refinement of their program, they developed effective best practices. However, Concern Universal has recognizes a need to become more systematic in their methods for monitoring and evaluating the impact of their projects.

Brett is focused on helping Concern Universal capture their on-the-ground impact in a more conscious and measurable manner. She is uniting the independent schemes for monitoring and evaluation from various projects within the department to create a uniform and standardized system to understand their impact.

Brett is also working alongside the Water and Environmental Sanitation team to increase focus of the monitoring and evaluation system to collect more qualitative, impact-focused data. While the qualitative data is harder to measure, it is critical to Concern Universal’s understanding of the sustainability of their impact, which is not captured by the number of wells drilled and facilities constructed. This includes information on matters such as whether communities are adopting hygiene practices that reduce the prevalence of disease.