By Bashir Hassan Abubakar
A hard-to-reach (HTR) community, Gabchiyari, in Darazo Local Government Area (LGA) of Bauchi are in dire need of potable water and other social amenities to make their community more habitable and also give their children an opportunity to reach their full potential in life, through sound education and improved health care services.
This was the clarion call made to the Bauchi State Government, International Development Partners and other well meaning citizens of the State and LGA by the residents of Gabchiyari Community when select group of Journalists went on a field visit on Thursday 16th March,2023 , preparatory to the commemoration of World Water Day, set aside by UN every 22nd of March to highlight issues around water globally.
The District head of Gabchiyari Community, Mallam Muhammad Garba, while welcoming the Journalists, said that the man hour being wasted by surrounding hamlets in seeking for water from a paid boreholes is taking its toll on the citizens of the community.
“Our community is a hard-to-reach area whose water challenges is being compounded by the absence of road. Surrounding hamlets travel between 3-5 kilometers to access paid potable water. So, you can imagine the productive hours spent in getting water.
“Ordinarily, it will take about 20 minutes to get to Gabchiyari from our LG Headquarters, but due to absence of feeder road, it will now take an average of one and half hours to get here, that is if the vehicle does not get stuck in the sand dunes that dotted our terrain. It is even worse during rainy season”, said the district head.
Mallam Garba then appealed to Bauchi State Government and other stakeholders to open up the community for ease of transporting their farm produce and also attract development for the community.
While sharing some insights into how lack of adequate potable water affects other critical areas of human development, the ward development community chairman of Gabchiyari, Aliyu Alhaji said that, lack adequate water affect school enrollment and retention, because the children spend school hours seeking for water and thereby missing school or abandoning it all together.
According to the WDC chairman, those children that made the effort to fetched the water and still attends school, you discover that they attend classes late and were usually fatigued to comprehend any meaningful exercise in class.
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But all hope is not lost as disclosed by the Darazo LGA Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Coordinator Ibrahim Mohammed Hassan.
He said that the Bauchi State Government have mainstream the LGA into a WASH project under the African Development Bank intervention signed by the State Government.
The WASH Coordinator was also quick to add that the only water scheme that will be productive in Gabchiyari community would be a motorized or solar powered borehole.
“It takes a minimum of 90 feet before we could hit water level here. This is because of the topography of the area. So, you can see that a hand pump borehole will not serve the purpose here”, Hassan said.
Our correspondent reports that the field visit was organized by UNICEF Field office Bauchi