www.savewaternamibia.com.na #SaveWaterNamibia
AB INBEV NAMIBIA TALKS WATER CONSERVATION Corporate giant AB InBev’s commitment to the social and environmental sustainability in the countries where they operate is evident in the execution of their Better World Sustainable Development strategy, which is applied with same amount of urgency and effort that they put into their business operations. AB InBev Namibia’s Legal and Corporate Affairs Manager, Maija-Lisa Hangala explains: “Our strategy is built on three pillars - Healthier World, Cleaner World and Growing World. For each of these pillars, there are specific projects that we concentrate on. With water becoming scarce in much of the world, water management was identified as a major priority under the pillar, a ‘Cleaner World.’ Our brewery in Okahandja primarily operates on recycled water, where we try to bring as much of the water that we use back into the plant. We are also assisting the Okahandja municipality to better manage their water system. AB InBev Namibia partnered on a project with the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry
to assist the ministry on saving and managing the water situation in Namibia, through our My Water, My Future, Our Namibia Campaign. After the water crisis was declared in Namibia, we did our research and found that Government is one of the biggest water users in the country, so we began a programme called My Water, My Future, Our Namibia, appointing people within each Government institution (known as Water Marshalls) who are responsible for Water Demand Management. The impact has been overwhelmingly positive.” Heibeb, Chief Engineering Technician for the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, who was appointed by his Director to be a Water Marshall, explains the impact of the programme: “We had a workshop on how to conduct water saving measurements. We were mandated to take water readings every day, to stop any leakages and to report what we could not fix. We started off by investigating all the toilets and we found a lot that were leaking. We bought
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Maija-Lisa Hangala LEGAL AND CORPORATE AFFAIRS MANAGER
mechanisms, and together with the Works Inspectors, started to fix all the leakages. We also put our contact details on notice boards so that people can alert us if there are leakages. At first we only had a bulk reading, which made it very difficult for us to trace high water consumption. So we installed one water meter in each block from where we were taking readings. On average, every person at the office should use 20 litres per day, and after we were able to compare water usage per block, we immediately saw a significant drop in water usage. My message to my fellow City of Windhoek residents is: Let’s save water where possible. For now we are privileged to get water in our homes, but there might come a time that we will have to collect water at one central point, or if we have no water at all that will be a disaster. Water is our life and it is our Namibia.”
PIETAN PARK (UNIT 13) REGEN STREET, SOUTHERN INDUSTRIAL AREA WINDHOEK NAMIBIA