Rotork pledges to keep the water flowing in Malawi

Partnership announcement

Rotork, the market leading provider of pumps and flow control products, has announced continued support for Pump Aid in to 2023. Building on its previous funding of water entrepreneurs and two Community Based Childcare Centres (CBCCs). In 2023 Rotork’s donation will focus on expanding access to clean water for over 50,000 rural poor people as well as implementing supports to communities affected by climate change. Over 85% of Malawi’s population live rurally and depend on small-scale agriculture as their source of nutrition. The vast majority cultivate a small portion of land and rely on rain-fed irrigation to water their crops. Climate change has impacted Malawi by making rainfall more erratic, causing both drought and flooding, wiping out precious crops and causing widespread food insecurity and loss of income.

Climate resilience

Rotork’s support will help to build resilience to the impact of climate change through several complementary activities. These include training farmers to use small-scale irrigation methods that have been shown to increased crop yields by over 100%, train women farmer groups in climate smart agriculture practices and establish co-operatives to support the sale of fresh produce. These activities will support, amongst others, 150 women farmers linked to CBCCs who have received Pump Aid support to improve hygiene and sanitation facilities as part of a package of continued support to communities.

Professionalised repair and maintenance

Rotork will also support the expansion of our professionalised waterpoint repair and maintenance initiative, delivered through our social enterprise Beyond Water. Up to 50% of Malawi’s 126,000 community waterpoints are non-functional at any one time. One of the leading causes for this is the lack of regular repair and maintenance and the replacement of fast wearing parts. This leads to complicated, expensive breakdowns and communities left without reliable access to clean water. The expansion of our innovative service, designed to provide affordable cover to communities, increasing pump functionality to over 95% and ensuring all the social, environmental and health benefits of sustainable clean water are realised.

We’d like to thank Rotork for their continued support of our work and we look forward to another year of keeping the water flowing in Malawi! If you are a business which has been inspired by Rotork’s work, check out our corporate partners page.