Well Drilling

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.

The Drill is now located in Ouagadougou and in May 25 is just beginning to go round different villages where there is no water source and provide wells. 

The cost of drilling, now we have our own machine is roughly half of the cost of using commercial drillers.

If you would like to finance the drilling of a borehole in a community where there is no water, please contact our office.  The price is between £3-5000 depending on how deep the ground water is in that location, whether they have a hand pump or solar pump, water tower and tank, etc.    email office@jacobswellappeal.org