AKLALET (Eritrea): In an area where little seems to have changed since Biblical times, engineers armed with laptops are bringing water to tens of thousands of refugees.

The challenge will be to keep the water flowing.

Aid workers in the Red Sea state of Eritrea are facing a dilemma that confronts attempts by foreigners to help countries across Africa: how to make sure projects survive when they go home.

“It’s all very well to provide bags of food and buckets of water and have a doctor jab them in the arm, but nothing’s going to stay forever,” said Paul de Launay, an Australian water specialist with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“We have to ensure that they can continue and even build on it. That’s a very big consideration for us,” he said, sweat trickling down his brow in the searing midday sun.

Behind him a generator roars into life, pumping water to the village of Aklalet, where residents use gleaming new taps provided by UNHCR to help cater for thousands of refugees returning from neighbouring Sudan to a landscape of arid plains.

By the end of the next year, de Launay says, he is likely to have moved on to help refugees in another remote corner of the world — but the government, like so many in Africa, will have problems filling the void alone.

Using a computer presentation, de Launay explains that if the government or donors do not take steps to build on the project then 99 per cent of the refugees will have insufficient water or land by 2007, perhaps leaving them worse off than in Sudan.

PRECIOUS AS GOLD: One thing is for sure — on the scorching plains of Eritrea’s Gash Barka province, water is precious as gold.

This is a land of ashen-coloured plains, rocky outcrops and dancing dust devils, where the superb blues, yellows and oranges of womens’ shawls provide the only splashes of colour in villages of mud and grass.

Temperatures soar towards 50 degrees Celsius, settlements fall silent at noon as residents seek shelter from the heat.

For locals who have in the past simply drawn water in buckets from stagnant pools in dry river beds, there seems no doubt that the project is working.

“There’s enough water for us, it’s excellent,” said 28-year-old Fatima Idriss, filling a jerry can in the middle of the village at a UNCHR tap. “Before we were getting water from only from the tanker truck, now you can get it at any time.”

In Gash Barka rivers turn into dust pans during the dry season, and rainfall all but ceases.

Aid workers have tapped water from underground rocks, part of a project that will cost $8 million in 2002 to drill boreholes, and set up schools and clinics for refugees returning after up to 30 years in Sudan.

The problem is that boreholes are not as simple as they look. They can run dry, pumps break down and spares are hard to come by, and villagers need to be trained in maintenance.

Africa is littered with projects that failed because they were not suited to their surroundings, but the UNHCR says it is doing all it can to ensure that this one will survive and other donors will continue the work.

WEAK STATE: Eritrea has a fierce belief in self-reliance forged during a 30-year liberation struggle with Ethiopia, but the fact remains that it has precious few resources to help itself.

The country of 3.7 million typifies many of the problems of states across the continent — from war, to hunger and strained relations with donors.

European donors have frozen non-humanitarian aid amid concerns over government authoritarianism, while a 1998-2000 border war disrupted farming and devastated the economy.

The government complains that the West is more than happy to shell out cash to pay for emergency situations when famine or drought hit the television screens, but claims the cupboards are bare when it comes to investing in the future.

Worse still, with the threat of famine looming over vast swathes of southern Africa and donors preoccupied with Afghanistan, Eritreans say their pleas for help, like many others in less glamorous locations, go unheard.

“In an emergency donors are interested, but when it comes to support and rehabilitation programmes the support is very slow,” said Ibrahim Said, director general of Relief and Logistics at the Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission.

“You go into a vicious circle, you back to an emergency situation and you need to ask the donors again,” he said.—Reuters