What is Madzi Alipo? The complete guide to Malawi's leading handpump management programme
- Fisherman's Rest Malawi
- May 6
- 9 min read
Before a child goes to school in rural Malawi, before a mother starts cooking or a farmer heads to his land, someone in the household walks to the nearest water point. It might be five minutes away or forty-five. The walk is rarely the concern.
As they approach the borehole, they’re thinking, will the water pump be working?
Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 40% of rural water infrastructure sits broken at any given time. Pumps are drilled, handed over to communities, and left. Parts are unavailable or unaffordable. There is no one to call for repairs. Downtime stretches from days into months, sometimes years, and families have little choice but to return to open water sources they know carry risk.
Madzi Alipo was built to change that pattern. There are places where pumps need to be drilled, but there are also too many existing pumps that sit broken. There was only one solution, build a system that keeps the water points already in the ground actually working.
Madzi Alipo: what the name means
Madzi Alipo is Chichewa for 'water is here.' The phrase carries a vision and confidence that the programme has spent thirteen years earning. The name was chosen deliberately as a promise to see water flowing - always. Historically ongoing infrastructure around water hasn’t been a topic of conversation, that is changing. Madzi Alipo is a statement about what happens when communities, mechanics, technology and sustained support are brought together collabroatively.
The programme is run by Fisherman's Rest Community Projects (FRCP), a UK-registered charity and Malawian NGO with over 35 years of grassroots work in Blantyre Rural, southern Malawi. It is led by a Malawian team, grounded in community relationships that predate the programme itself, and driven by a single practical ambition: clean water for everyone, always.
Where it started
The Madzi Alipo programme began in 2012 as a rapid repair initiative. Rural Blantyre had the same problem visible across Malawi: water points installed, then broken, then abandoned. Left with a sack tied over the base.
Communities had no access to affordable spare parts, no training in basic maintenance, and no reliable route to report a fault or call for help. Water points with incredibly simple fixes were simply failing permanently because no one knew how to fix them.
Because FRCP works in one specific area, we had been working alongside our communities long enough to understand the deeper shape of the problem. The issue (mostly) was not a shortage of boreholes, although there are remote, impassable by car areas still without access to a hand pump, it was the complete absence of any management system around them.
Repair or installation without a system is simply a slower form of the same failure. Madzi Alipo focuses on managing water infrastructure across an entire Territorial Authority, including localised education.
Over thirteen years, that foundation has grown into a comprehensive, multi-layered model that today covers roughly 2,400 handpumps across Blantyre Rural, with interventions at a national level when called upon.
2025 at a glance
How the Madzi Alipo handpump management model works
Most water programmes operate in a single dimension: they build, they fix or they do both. Very few address a long term repair amd maintentance solutions, community education, local financial contributions, wider ecology of water and quality part sourcing.
In fact we don’t know of anyone else implementing a water management system for rural handpumps in Africa. Except Madzi Alipo.
Madzi Alipo operates across seven connected work pillars simultaneously. Each one addresses a different layer of the same problem, and each one reinforces the others. Remove any one of them, and the system will weaken.
1. Real-time monitoring through MAMS
At the centre of the programme sits MAMS — the Madzi Alipo Management System — a near real-time database of every monitored water point across Blantyre Rural. It maps infrastructure, tracks condition and functionality, logs repair histories, and enables teams to identify problem clusters and respond with precision. Every quarter, Madzi Alipo reports water point functionality data to the Blantyre District Water Office and District Council, a level of accountability that is genuinely rare in Malawi's water sector.
MAMS has now been operational for nearly 12 years, making it a data rich source for the WaSH sector.
MAMS is open-source and freely accessible to universities, NGOs, WaSH stakeholders and government partners on application. The data gathered does not sit in a closed system serving internal reporting. Its vision is to be shared, integrated with other’s field work, and built upon.
2. Community SMS reporting and the call centre
A database is only as useful as the information flowing into it. In 2025, Madzi Alipo rolled out a community SMS reporting system so that when a pump fails, communities can report it immediately from wherever they are, and action can follow fast.
That reporting connects directly to the Madzi Alipo call centre, a small team of trained operators led by Joshua Ndaluza. The call centre is the connective tissue between communities and the technical team. Calls are logged, problems are categorised, patterns are tracked, and the data feeds back into planning so that recurring faults across multiple communities can be addressed systematically rather than one at a time. It’s this data that has informed our quality parts programme, currently being rolled out in Malawi.
For communities in remote areas, the call centre carries a significance beyond logistics. The team puts it plainly: even people in Nsanje district, hours away, with a small problem in their borehole, have the ability to speak to someone, express their problem and get help. The call centre allows every voice to be heard, in areas where reaching the Madzi Alipo offices would mean a full day's travel, that telephone line is the difference between a reported fault and a pump breaking down without help for months on end.
"Madzi Alipo has improved downtime, increased water accessibility, and reduced the need for small repair call outs, as communities are now fixing and maintaining their hand pumps thanks to the Madzi Alipo training school."
— Stevie Chibambo, Area Mechanic and community leader, TA Somba
3. Training and capacity building
Sustainable water access requires communities to be active participants in maintaining it, not passive recipients of an external service. Madzi Alipo runs structured training workshops for water point committees, area mechanics, NGOs, and government partners, building the knowledge and confidence to handle routine maintenance and minor repairs without needing to call the central team.
Stevie Chibambo, an area mechanic and community leader in TA Somba who has watched the programme grow from its earliest days, describes the transformation from an era when spare parts were unavailable and boreholes could sit broken for over three years, to a context where communities now fix and maintain their own pumps as a matter of course. That shift does not happen through infrastructure alone, but years of dedication, commitment to change and a vision.
4. Improved parts — designed for Malawi
One of the most persistent barriers to reliable water access in rural Malawi has been the quality and availability of replacement parts. Standard handpump components were not designed with Malawi's specific soil conditions, water table depths and usage patterns in mind. Manufacturing shortcuts and driving quality down for a cheaper price have all compounded into parts failing faster than they should. Repairs and maintenance are frequent, and the long-term cost to communities is higher than it needs to be or should be.
FRCP has developed a range of improved replacement components manufactured for handpumps by Genesis Ltd. These include floating centralisers, fixed centralisers, and riser main sockets, all designed and tested to extend operational life and reduce the frequency of major repairs. The Madzi Alipo 2.0 upgrade programme continues to be presented at international water and sanitation forums, with the hope to gain investment. The parts development work has attracted attention at a national and global level.
5. Water quality testing
Access to water and access to safe water are not the same thing. There used to be an assumption that a deep water well meant safe water. In the field we started to suspect differently.
Although boreholes are underground water sources, the Madzi Alipo team were seeing similar problems to open water in various areas, especially in flood zones. When responding to cholera outbreaks in partnership with MSF, the team realised the need to test boreholes.
Now, Madzi Alipo runs routine and on-demand water quality testing across its monitored area, with an ongoing microbiological study across Traditional Authority.
Now, Madzi Alipo runs routine and on-demand water quality testing across its monitored area, with an ongoing microbiological study across TA (Traditional Authority) Somba testing samples in both dry and wet seasons. Where bacterial counts are high, the team can take targeted action: hygiene education, treatment support, and follow-up testing.
The programme's work on water quality has contributed to a measurable shift in community behaviour. Where previously chlorine treatment was met with reluctance, communities across the programme area have moved towards widespread adoption of both preventive measures at source and effective treatment at the point of use.
6. Community financing — DreamSave/SaveMadzi
Water maintenance requires money, and the communities Madzi Alipo serves have very little of it. So every contribution towards water is precious. Madzi Alipo implemented an accountable system, SaveMadzi, to enable communities to contribute fairly towards repair costs in a way that is transparent, trackable, and trustworthy.
The system used is called SaveMadzi and is managed from a mobile application.
Where paper-based records were previously lost, damaged or disputed, SaveMadzi creates a clear digital record of every contribution, every loan repayment, and the total reserve fund, accessible to all committee members and the community.
The impact on community relationships has been significant. Mrs Misozi Msukwa, a committee chairperson from Namonde village, describes how the transparency SaveMadzi provides has fundamentally changed the trust between community members and their water point committee. When the numbers are visible and verifiable, the relationship that sustains the whole system holds together far better.
7. Environmental conservation
Reliable water access depends on more than infrastructure. In collaboration with Malawi's Ministry of Natural Resources and Fisherman’s Rest Tree Project, Madzi Alipo promotes reforestation, groundwater recharge, and watershed management across its operational area. Deforestation accelerates soil erosion and reduces the capacity of the land to hold and filter water. This is a new component to the programme, by connecting water security to environmental stewardship and two Fisherman’s Rest projects together, the programme addresses the long-term conditions that determine whether boreholes remain viable at all.
What communities say
Roda Chiotha, a water point committee member from Mwamadi village, captures the practical difference the programme has made in daily life. Before Madzi Alipo, accessing spare parts meant travelling to Limbe, a significant distance that cost more in transport than the part itself. When Madzi Alipo began, her water point kept running because affordable parts were available nearby, and the team was only called for major repairs, which became far less frequent.
"My children now attend classes on time, without delays, because water is readily available. All thanks to Madzi Alipo for their timely and affordable support."
— Roda Chiotha, Water Point Committee Member, Mwamadi village
That little detail, children arriving at school on time, is easy to overlook in a conversation about water infrastructure. It is also exactly the point. When a pump fails, the ripple moves through the whole day, the whole household and the whole village. When it works reliably, those ripples stop. School attendance improves and the energy spent finding water elsewhere is freed for something else entirely.
Where Madzi Alipo is heading
In 2026, the programme is set to expand into Nsanje district in southern Malawi, a move that reflects both its growing reputation and the increasing demand from communities beyond Blantyre Rural. Funding has been secured that is expected to extend into 2027, covering both programme operations and a dedicated parts development and marketing initiative.
Parts are being manufactured in Malawi and the roll out and impact of these will be seen over the coming months and years.
Madzi Alipo has also been invited into a national handpump evaluation and advisory programme in Malawi, a recognition that the model developed in Blantyre Rural has something to offer the wider sector. The ambition remains unchanged: to take this proven approach Malawi-wide, and eventually across Africa, bringing the same reliable water access to communities who currently have none of the systems that make it possible.
Join the work
Madzi Alipo is actively seeking strategic partnerships and funding to scale what it has built. Whether you are a grant-awarding body, a university or research institution, an NGO working in water and sanitation, or an individual who wants to follow the programme closely, there are concrete ways to get involved.
Download the Madzi Alipo prospectus at madzialipoapp.org for a detailed overview of the programme, its model, and its funding priorities.
Apply for access to MAMS, Malawi's most comprehensive water point database, open to universities, NGOs and WaSH partners.
Book a collaboration call with Harlod Zaunda, Madzi Alipo Project Manager, to discuss partnership opportunities.
Rehabilitate a borehole and receive a personalised report from the team.
Madzi Alipo is proof that community-led, reliable rural water provision and a management system in rural Africa is possible. It is happening right now, in Malawi.
The question is how quickly it can reach communities beyond where we currently work, in desperate need of a system?
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