Good afternoon. A bucket of water greets you when you visit many a hospital toilet up and down the country. It is not that hospitals and health clinics do not have wash basins and flushing toilets; it is that quite often, they do not work, because the running water and sewage system has not been maintained properly. Some hospitals date back over 50 years to the Portuguese colonial period, and are in need of replacement or renovation. Others are newer, having been built with donor funds, but once they were completed, the donors went home and the government did not find the money to look after them. In some hospitals, nurses have to make long journeys to a borehole to refill their buckets, taking them away from their patients.
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None of this will be news to anyone familiar with Mozambican hospitals and how they operate, but the problem has been highlighted by the NGO WaterAid in a new survey, which finds that only 56% of healthcare facilities in Maputo, Gaza and Niassa provinces have “basic access” to water supply, according to reports (see below). If access to toilets and other hygiene facilities is included, the number of facilities with basic provision falls to just 16%.
