Slobozia Mare is located in southern Moldova, more than 200 km away from the capital city of Chisinau. Many of its 6’000 inhabitants make a living from breeding poultry and cultivating vegetables. The long distance from wells with drinking water has always been a major issue.
Eight out of ten villagers have access to a water system, but the quality of the water is worrisome. The old pipes make water rusty and muddy, and the water is highly concentrated in metals exceeding legal norms. So the villagers used to collect rain water in large receptacles and store them away.
Like most villages in Moldova, Slobozia Mare has lost more than 10 percent of its inhabitants to migration. In many cases, villagers have found better job opportunities abroad, and their remittance payments make significant contributions to the economy at home.
The project Migration and Local Development (MiDL), financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and implemented by the United Nations Development Program in Moldova (UNDP), is exploring whether bringing residents and migrants together can amplify local voices and create practical solutions to calcified problems.
Residents and migrants join efforts
In Slobozia Mare, residents and migrants gradually joined forces to form a Home Town Association, now an officially registered NGO. After online and offline public consultations, local authorities, residents and migrants decided together that the most pressing problem of Slobozia Mare was the access to drinking water. However, financial resources were missing. That’s when the first ever crowdfunding campaign for a community project was launched in Moldova.
In three months, more than 100 residents and migrants collected 4,500 Swiss Francs (CHF). The amount was topped with CHF 2,000 from the local administration and with a CHF 20,000 grant from SDC.
Within a month, a company selected via public tender completed the works, changing the damaged pipes across the village and extending pipelines to other neighbourhoods. Some of the village residents volunteered to help workers with digging the ducts.
For Aculina Girnet, 82 years old, this is the first time she has clean running water at her house. “When I saw tap water in my household, I cried. I have built this house and raised three children. You can imagine how much water I have carried for food, washing and other necessities over the year,” she says. Now drinking water reaches all households in Aculina’s neighbourhood, where 21 poor families, 99 children and 21 elderly live.
Ecaterina Chiciuc enjoys clean water in their house as well. Her granddaughter, Violeta Tulum, is happy she has enough time for her studies and hobbies. “I can’t imagine how tough life it has been for my grandmother and mother,” she says. It looks like in Violeta’s life, the image of women carrying water in buckets across long distances may finally become a distant memory.
About the project
Over 200,000 people from 23 rural settlements in Moldova have benefited from the Migration and Local Development project, financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and implemented by UNDP in Moldova. The project aims to improve local infrastructure and living conditions. It brings together residents and migrants of rural localities to prioritize the main issues facing their communities, and helps connect them to municipalities and international donors to help them solve those issues.
So far, nearly 800,000 CHF have been invested in 18 villages and five cities. Out of this amount, approximately 118,000 CHF represent crowdfunding efforts by Moldovan migrants living abroad. Another CHF 214,000 was provided by local authorities and CHF 460,000 by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
