West Darfur town, villages suffer from acute drinking water crisis

People living in Babanusa and El Sunut in West Kordofan complain about an acute shortages of drinking water.

Salah Mohamedi, a leading member of the Forces for Freedom and Change in Babanusa, told Radio Dabanga that the commercial price of a barrel of water jumped to SDG 150 ($ 2,72*). “A month ago, we paid SDG 50.”

He attributed the water outages to mismanagement.

“The repeated breaking-down of the water engines due to the absence of periodic maintenance, and to the poor quality of the water network in the town,” he explained. “The water network in Babanusa currently operates with only two water engines out of ten. Most of the wells have only one water engine.”

A large number of villages in West Kordofan’s El Sunut locality also suffer from a lack of drinking water. “We are now forced to fetch water from remote areas,” a villager told this station. “The price of a barrel of water on the black market has risen to more than SDG 100.”

The source explained that the affected villages in El Sunut rely on pumps for the water provision. “Yet these engines have now completely stopped working.”

He called on the West Kordofan government and Khartoum to take urgent action to solve the problem.

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