March 2024
A special mention goes to one of our grower partners, the Namibian Grape Company (NGC) with exporter CapeSpan for their incredible team effort to put infrastructure in place to provide additional access points to clean drinking water for workers living in this dry and arid land, near the banks of the Orange River.
This multi-phase project has been a long time coming - since three years ago in fact. The need for more water points (and more easily accessible potable water) were identified and the Aussenkehr Community Water Access Evaluation was done. Through this very comprehensive process, the community water supply situation was evaluated at Aussenkehr and recommendations offered for feasible community water supply options. Project implementation strategies (short-term and longer-term) were recommended. The focus was to improve the access to potable water for farm workers of NGC as well as the Aussenkehr informal housing community.
The project would impact mainly farm workers and their dependents, but also job seekers and some employed who are not farm workers. Within the grape companies impacted by this project, there was an estimated 12,000 permanent farm workers
and 17,000 during harvest season. Seasonal workers are on site between June and January and generally peak from August onwards.
Various recommendations were made after a detailed analysis of the potable water supply options and what was needed to complete the different phases of this very complex project, incorporating various stakeholders in the area. These photos were taken in October 2023, during a site visit by our Waitrose Foundation Manager: Farm Support, Raymond Engelbrecht. We appreciate the extremely challenging conditions experienced by the team who has been involved in the various implementation phases.
