Reclaiming Time, Restoring Childhood: Clean Water Arrives in Manguar After Decades of Need

For as long as anyone at Manguar Primary School can remember, water was the thing that stood between children and their education. Since 1992, the community in Akoc Payam had gone without a single borehole. Every school day began the same way: not with lessons, but with a search.

Nyakiir, a 15-year-old Primary Six pupil, remembers those mornings well. Before the borehole came, she and her classmates walked from home to home, and sometimes all the way to a nearby stream, just to find enough water to get through the day.

“Before we had a borehole, getting water was very hard. We walked to different homes and sometimes to a stream to find water. During the dry season, the stream dried up, and there was very little water. Many children missed school because they had to look for water,” Nyakiir recollects.

The dry season was the hardest stretch of all. As the stream shrank and then disappeared, so did attendance. Pupils arrived late, or didn't come at all, pulled away from their books by the more urgent task of keeping their households supplied with water. Teachers felt the strain of trying to deliver lessons to classrooms that were never quite full.

Mr. Michael Manut, a teacher at the school, has watched this cycle repeat itself for years. He still remembers what it meant, after more than three decades without reliable water, to finally see a borehole rise from the ground in his community.

“It is a great achievement to finally have clean water in the area,” shares Mr. Michael Manut, a Teacher at Manguar Primary School.

Today, that daily struggle is gone. Clean, safe water flows right at the school, and with it has come a quiet but powerful shift in how children experience their education. Pupils no longer lose the morning to fetching water. They arrive on time, stay through the day, and can focus in class rather than counting down the hours until they can search for water again.

For girls especially, the change has meant something even deeper. With clean water close by, girls can stay clean and manage their health with dignity, including during their monthly periods a factor that, across South Sudan, often determines whether girls stay in school at all.

“Today, we have clean and safe water at our school. Girls can also stay clean and healthy, especially during their monthly periods.” Nyakiir recalls. 

The borehole's impact reaches well beyond the school gates. Families from surrounding villages now come to the same pump to collect water for drinking and cooking, easing a burden that once touched nearly every household in the area and making daily life healthier for the wider community.

The new borehole at Manguar Primary School was made possible through the Enhancing Community Resilience and Local Governance Project Phase II (ECRP II), a government-led initiative funded by the World Bank and implemented by the Ministry of Finance and Planning and the Local Government Board, in partnership with World Vision.

Story and photo Stella Leonardo | Communications officer