Fluoride-Free Water Brings Smiles in Ethiopia

By Debbie DeVoe

Talk to a group of parents in the Ethiopian village of Langano, and you'll likely be greeted by browned and blackened teeth in their appreciative smiles. Talk to their children though, and you'll be welcomed by row upon row of healthy white teeth.

This seemingly cosmetic difference reflects the significantly improved health of area residents because of a water system built by Catholic Relief Services.

"We used to go for a long journey to fetch water from the lake. We'd sometimes even give birth on the way," explains Lone Ifa, a 30-year-old mother of four children. "Now we have water nearby our houses. We've started washing our clothes and our children and keep them clean."

Hold the Fluoride, Please

Back in 2002, CRS used a drilling rig purchased through the generosity of CRS donors to dig a borehole in Langano village in Ethiopia's semiarid central Rift Valley. After digging down 240 feet, the rig finally struck water — an unimaginable gift for residents living in an area where drought occurs regularly. For centuries, the closest water during the long dry season was a dirty lake five miles away.

Unfortunately, though, CRS and our local partner, the Alem Tena Catholic Church, discovered that the deep groundwater had an exceedingly high fluoride content. In the United States, many communities add fluoride to their water sources to make teeth strong. In the Rift Valley area of Ethiopia, however, where more than 10 million people live, the amount of fluoride exceeds the healthy limit by more than 400 percent. People who regularly drink such heavily tainted water — having no other choice — can end up with dental and skeletal fluorosis, which can severely blacken teeth from advanced tooth decay and even cripple skeletal systems to the point where people are badly hunched and unable to move.

"To make the water healthy for use, we needed to construct a defluoridation system," explains Bekele Abaire, CRS Ethiopia's water-sanitation program manager. "We formed a task force of key players, including community members, CRS partners, government agents and researchers from the Addis Ababa University. Working together, we determined the best defluoridation system for filtering the water using a method the community could easily maintain."

Community Care

The Langano Water and Sanitation Committee now oversees the water system. Every day a member of this committee, trained by funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), starts up the pump. The pump moves water one mile from the borehole to the storage tank closer to the village. The committee member then pumps some of the untreated water to another tank, where he mixes in aluminum sulfate and lime. After two hours, the treated water is released to the public water points, with its fluoride content now reduced to a healthy level through the chemical bonding of the aluminum sulfate and fluoride.

More than 6,500 people now rely on the Langano system for their daily water needs, including 1,500 who trek in from surrounding villages to take advantage of the clean water. Nine other community-managed defluoridation systems — seven built with OFDA funding and two additional ones constructed with CRS private donations — give 43,500 more people in the Rift Valley access to safe and adequate water. And this number will continue to grow. In 2008, CRS plans to use OFDA funding to rehabilitate and scale up the Langano water supply system, construct additional defluoridation systems to reach more people, and determine ways to increase long-term impact

To cover the costs of defluoridation materials and maintenance fees, people using the Langano water system pay about 1 cent per liter of treated water collected, with most families buying around 40 liters a day. Fortunately, residents say they have enough money to pay for the water, especially with the help of other CRS projects, such as seed distributions to increase crop production.

"I don't care about the money," Lone observes, handing her young baby an ear of corn. "I care about the fluoride. Our children won't be affected [adversely] by the water."

Debbie DeVoe is CRS' regional information officer in East Africa. She is based in Nairobi and recently visited CRS projects in Ethiopia.