Rural Water Supply  

Installing a water pump at a rural home not only reduces common water related diseases like diarrhoea, dysentery, and cholera, but also provides income opportunities through irrigation of home gardens, water for raising animals, and small-scale enterprises like ice making.  

With the support of ICCO, IDE started promoting the use of hand pumps and tube-wells in rural Vietnam for both garden irrigation and domestic water supply in 1995. IDE has strengthened and established profitable supply chains consisting of manufacturers, distributors, well drillers and pump installation teams. These small businesses, collectively employing more than 200 people, provide hand pumps and drilled wells with guarantees and after-sales services for as little as $30. Since 1995, these businesses have sold and installed more than 64,000 pumps in Thanh Hoa, Thua Thien Hue, and Quang Nam provinces.

In the start-up phase of the project, IDE conducted rural marketing including meetings to motivate hamlet and union leaders, group meetings of potential customers, self employed sales agents, open-air display stands at rural marketplaces, rural video shows, posters, and leaflets to stimulate sales throughout the countryside. 

The businesses now manage their own marketing efforts with no external support, and continue to install nearly 1,000 pumps per month. Rural families are continuing to buy more than 10,000 hand pumps per year from private sector enterprises, representing a continued user investment of  $300,000 annually. In rural areas that have electricity, microenterprises have adapted their businesses by adding electric pumps to their portfolio of products and services. 

This program demonstrates that it is possible to motivate families to purchase water supply technologies and to build the capacity of the private sector to supply those technologies without the use of subsidies.

Based on its interest in unsubsidised, market-based rural water supply development, the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) funded an appraisal and documentation of IDE’s hand pump program. Click here to download this document.