Water Aid

Well Drilling in Burkina Faso

In autumn 2023  autumn, our CEO John Beynon visited our existing projects in Burkina Faso, taking along Paul Brown, a retired Engineer who had spent a couple of years buying and refurbishing a second hand well drilling rig. As is often the case when shipping vehicles to Africa, someone in the port had stolen all the diesel and had probably tried to steal the drilling rig itself except they couldn’t manage to start it (there was a hidden immobilizer switch that they
hadn’t found). When they couldn’t start the engine, they took
various parts of the engine to pieces to try and start the truck, but when they still couldn’t start it, they put the pieces back on, in the wrong order, hence damaging the engine! After a couple of days of fixing the drilling rig, Paul was finally able to drill our first bore hole, whilst at the same time teaching a group of Africans how to use the machine, so that they could continue using the machine once Paul was no-longer in the country. As you can see, we successfully drilled down to the water and made our first bore hole. Since returning to the UK, the team have continued to use the machine, recently drilling a bore hole at one of the local hospitals which was previously purchasing all the water it needed from donkey carts! We hope that this machine will enable us to drill many more wells for needy projects and communities. The cost of drilling, now we have our own machine is roughly half of the cost of using commercial drillers.