Hydro Industries opens water plant for 82 African villages

A Carmarthenshire company is helping to provide clean drinking water to half a million east Africans.

Llangennech-based Hydro Industries officially opens a treatment plant, which it has designed and manufactured, in Sudan on Saturday.

It will deliver 8.5 million litres of water to 82 villages every day.

The opening coincides with the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Welsh Government's Wales for Africa programme.

The quality of the treated water will be similar to that in the UK

Until now villagers used an irrigation system fed by the Blue Nile river

Wales for Africa was launched in response to the Make Poverty History campaign and encourages Welsh people and companies to get involved in development work in Africa.

Since then 528 projects across 25 African nations have been supported.

They include the Anglesey-based company SaddleAid, which developed a saddle to allow pregnant women and sick people living in remote parts of Ethiopia to be transported safely to hospital by horse.

Rhondda Cynon Taff-based charity PONT has been helping to improve the lives of poor people in the Mbale region of Uganda.

To date the charity has:

• Trained over 1,200 village health workers

• Provided education for over 100,000 children

• Supplied 20,000 families with mosquito nets

• Supplied 2,000 families with goats for milk

A woman using a specially developed horse saddle