Her initiative coincided with her husband's loosing his job at the height of Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown in 2008 and has helped with the upkeep of the small family ever since.
Chitembwe, a mother of three, would collect empty 500 millilitre plastic containers of the popular local Cascade drink and fill them with borehole water. A resident of Highfield, Harare, Chitembwe would fetch the borehole water from as far as Glen View then.
Now she has found a water source in Highfield, which she would not disclose for obvious reasons. She cools it in the refrigerator overnight.
Chitembwe told The Zimbabwean how it all started – with neighbours seeing her collect the empty containers suspecting that she could have become mentally disturbed.
“One night in 2008 I had a rare dream in which I featured selling some bottled liquid to the public along a busy area. The dream troubled me until I came up with the initiative to benefit from the severe water crisis hitting Harare then. As the sources of public water continued to dwindle around Harare coupled with the unsafe water pumped by the local authority into household taps when it rarely came, I was convinced that bottled water was the way to go,” Chitembwe said, proudly revealing that she was the only one selling water along the streets of Harare drawing both excitement and disapproval from the public.
Each bottle would sell for Z$40 and at the end of the day the total sales would be changed into R100 or US$10. She would ply the trade at the Fourth Street, Copacabana, Charge Office and Market Square termini.
Two fridges
In time, she managed to buy two refrigerators, one for the water business and the other for the family’s food storage.
Economic hard times forced children from some families to drop out of school but Chitembwe could afford sending her eldest child to boarding school at Nyatsime High in Chitungwiza.
Neighbours, who had made her a laughing stock because of the ‘degrading trade’, began to visit the Chitembwe family to borrow money and ask for food. In addition to meeting part of the neighbours’ requests, Chitembwe would lecture on the benefits of selling bottled borehole water around town.
Some of the neighbours bought the idea and their lives have since been transformed.
“I realised that people wanted safe and clean water sold from clean containers. To maintain the expected hygienic standards, I wash the collected empty containers with Sunlight liquid and warm water.
“I would not use tap water whenever it was available as it had a bad odour and some visible floating foreign objects,” she said.
$15 a day
Throughout the Government of National Unity era to date, she has been using empty water bottles collected at gatherings such as workshops. With her connections among the social activists, she gets advised of availability of the containers at various gatherings.
She sells the water for 30 cents a bottle. During the tobacco selling season, when other water dealers sell the water at $1 per 500 ml bottle to farmers at tobacco auction floors, Chitembwe would stick to the 30 cents price. She makes around $15 a day.
“Now that I have established a sound market at all corners of Harare, my dream is to have cold rooms for mass storage of the bottled water which I would sell in bulk to other traders,” she said, pointing out that dozens of people around Harare in the water business would buy water from her for resale at 50 cents each, making 20 cents profit per bottle.
Chitembwe would not allow her photo to be taken as she was not sure whether the Zimbabwe National Water Authority had authorised the tapping of underground water for sale without paying tax.
ZINWA, which governs the country’s water bodies, has said it intends to install meters on boreholes countrywide to control the use of the precious liquid.
Post published in: Analysis