Mozambique: Hotels, restaurants worst hit by post-election violence
South Korea to finance Gaza water systems with US$3 million
4:10 CAT | 30 Jun 2019
FILE: According to the Deputy Minister of Public Works, Victor Tuacale, the money will be spent on building eight new small scale water supply systems, and drilling 32 boreholes from which the water will be pumped. [File photo: Notícias]
South Korea has agreed to provide three million US dollars to finance water supply systems in the southern Mozambican province of Gaza, under an agreement signed on Thursday between the National Water Supply Directorate and the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA).
The project, which will take 30 months to build, is intended to supply clean water to about 40,000 people in Mapai and Chicualacuala districts in the arid Gaza interior.
According to the Deputy Minister of Public Works, Victor Tuacale, the money will be spent on building eight new small scale water supply systems, and drilling 32 boreholes from which the water will be pumped.
“The budget for the projects is three million dollars, half of which will go to Chicualacuala district, and half to Mapai”, said Tuacale, cited by Radio Mozambique. “This money is already being disbursed, and we think the building work will be completed within the deadlines laid down in the project”.
Currently less than 40 per cent of the population of Chicualacuala and Mapai have access to a reliable source of water, and in parts of these districts water is distributed in tanker trucks.
The Gaza provincial director of public works, Angelo Ramos, explained that the districts are in a naturally arid part of the province. Water has to be pumped from great depths and, even so, it is generally brackish.
“There is a high level of salinity in the water extracted, and the water table is found at a great depth”, he said. “So the results of the drilling we have undertaken so far have often been negative”.
He pointed to the boreholes in the Machaila administrative post, in Mapai, and in the area of Tzaxe, in Chicualacuala. “We drilled several boreholes, but in all of them, the water was brackish”, said Ramos. “Right now the solution we found was to install a desalination system in Machaila”.
The cooperation between Mozambique and South Korea covers particularly the areas of energy, information technologies, and infrastructure, notably the building of bridges, roads, schools and hospitals.
Mozambique is one of the priority countries supported by the Korean Cooperation Fund for Economic Development in Africa.
Source: AIM
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