While most of Bolivia has running water piped into their homes and businesses, in the hillside settlement of Alto Buena Vista, south of the city of Cochabamba, the residents depend on tankers to carry water to them.
The community of Maria Auxiliadora, just a few valleys away, gets their water piped into their homes from a 69-metre community well that taps into an aquifer and is pumped up the hill to the around 370 households.
In Cochabamba however, there has basically always been a history of water struggles. The city made international headlines at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one when residents protested vehemently against the privatisation of their water system and subsequent water hikes. The privatisation was overturned but to date the municipal water network has still not reached areas such as Alto Buena Vista.
Residents say that they do not know where the trucked water comes from and that delivery is not always reliable but that they have no other choice but to buy it when they can otherwise they will have no water at all.
In Maria Auxiliadora, one of the approximately 700 neighbourhoods with community water projects in Cochabamba and surrounds, residents have water meters and pay for what they use thanks to the well that was paid for by Swiss NGO PAMS-Suiza and the community on a 50-50 basis. While there are many projects, their size and water reliability and water quality all differ and virtually none of the projects has any support from the Bolivian government.
Getting water from the trucks is expensive (approximately 10x more expensive than water from a community well) and the water often contains bacterial contamination way above the limit for human consumption.
The problem is that the communities do not trust the private water companies or the municipal water provider to take control of their water system, but the region’s contaminated lakes, rivers and dams definitely need government intervention to turn them into clean waterways.
The UN declared water a Human Right, yet there are still unfortunately too many people, especially in poor areas, who have little or no access to potable water and hygienic sanitation and that is criminal.
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