THE Namibia Water Corporation on Friday received a N$6 million German grant to fund the Ohangwena aquifer project.
The corporation said at a press conference that the funds had come from the German Federal Institute for Geoscience and Natural Resources, and work on the construction of the plant to remove excess fluoride from the Ohangwena II aquifer will start soon.
The aquifer was discovered in 2012.
NamWater chief executive Vaino Shivute said the aquifer will at the moment only supply water to the small town of Eenhana, where it is situated.
The project is aimed at boosting water supplies through the Oshakati-Omakango-Omafo pipeline.
NamWater had drilled three boreholes at the aquifer by May 2017, which had a high yield of 120 cubic metres per hour abstraction.
Deputy agriculture permanent secretary Abraham Nehemia told the press conference, also attended by the German department of water affairs’ representative Martin Quinger, that the country is lucky to have underground water as a natural resource that can supply other parts of the country with water with the success of the Eenhana project.
The aquifer currently supplies Eenhana with about 40 cubic metres an hour through the three boreholes drilled in 2017.
reported in 2016 that the agriculture ministry had carried out investigations to determine aquifer yield, size, and for how much it can be sustainably abstracted.
The investigations revealed that the aquifer stretched 75km from the Ondobe constituency towards the east, and about 40 km towards the Angolan border, and holds 20 billion cubic metres of fresh water.
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