City water project handy - Daily Nation

Supplying water to its fast-growing population of more than four million is one of Nairobi City County’s biggest challenges. This is a perennial problem that needs to be solved to ensure that residents, industries and other organisations have a reliable supply of clean water. Nairobi is, perhaps, the only major city where residents get water only once a week.

The water shortage poses the grave threat of waterborne diseases. There have been cholera outbreaks, shaming the capital city for its inability to ensure that all the residents have clean water to drink and for domestic use such as cooking and washing. Cholera is a primitive disease, arising out of contaminated water, and which should have no place in a modern metropolis.

However, what residents find ironical is that, even during heavy rains, when dams that supply water to the city are overflowing, the rationing continues.

It all boils down to the lack of capacity by Nairobi Water and Sewerage Company to process and pump enough water to the city. Nairobi has an installed water treatment system capacity to process only 525,600 cubic metres of the commodity daily, against a demand of 810,000m³.

It is quite encouraging to note that the new Nairobi Metropolitan Services has started drilling boreholes and erecting elevated steel water tanks to boost supply, especially to the slums, where water shortages are more acute.

The urgency cannot be gainsaid, considering the challenge from the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides social distancing, the message on how to curb the spread of the deadly disease is about maintaining a high standard of hygiene by regularly washing hands.

Increasing water sources will boost the effort to curb the spread of the highly contagious disease. The boreholes are cost-effective means to improve water supply.