The Wadi Fira region in Chad has long served as a refuge for displaced people. Since April 2023, more than 80,000 people fleeing violence in Sudan have crossed Wadi Fira, increasing pressure on the camps and surrounding communities. By May 2024, water availability in the Kobe camps had at times fallen below emergency standards, highlighting the critical need for immediate water interventions.
Roland Couprie worked with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Chad as a WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) team leader in Wadi Fira. During his assignment, Roland implemented water supply solutions in refugee camps to help those fleeing the ongoing violence in Sudan.
The WASH project started around the village of Korobo, on the Sudanese border in Darfur, for a population of 2,000 to 5,000 refugees, who fled the fighting and cannot return home.
One of the difficulties of this project is that this population cannot go to the UNHCR refugee camps because they have herds to tend and harvests to do in the coming weeks.
They therefore have no access to shelter, food or water.
The Korobo well when we arrived to start the project
We are staying in a new base located in the city of Guereda about an hour west of the Sudanese border. At the moment the team has only two international staff on site for the opening of the project. The rest of the team (project coordination, administration, medical staff, and health promotion) are based in Iriba and should join the new base in a few months.
We wake up around 5:30am, to prepare ourselves and the equipment we need for the day. Our two drivers arrive at 6:30am to depart to the project at 7:00 am. Breakfast and lunch will consist of a flatbread and a can of sardines eaten on the road to save time.
We travel in convoy with the mobile clinic teams for safety reasons and in case we breakdown or get stuck in the sand. It takes about 2.5 hours to reach the project sites located on the edge of the Sudanese border.
The main activity is located in Korobo, where the refugees and their livestock have only one well to access water. The quantity of water is not at all sufficient for the entire population and it is dangerously contaminated because of the presence of many animals near the well and the infiltration of stagnant water in which the population wades, barefoot.
For the past month, our work has involved increasing the quantity of water available for the refugees and their livestock as well as for the local population, and optimising the quality as much as possible to make it drinkable.
MSF water distribution to refugee communities in Korobo with pick-up tanks © Roland Couprie/MSF
Firstly, we urgently drilled two boreholes and installed two water distribution tanks. At the same time, we organised water distribution to supply refugee areas that were more remote and/or had no resources to fetch water (such as by horse or donkey).
In the second step, we rehabilitated and secured the well. We also built a water trough so that the animals could drink without causing contamination.
The last step was to disinfect the cans and treat the water produced to ensure its potability and thus reduce the number of waterborne diseases, especially diarrhea and severe diarrhea in children.
For this we have trained 8 people who are responsible for chlorinating the water in the tanks in the distribution pickups and for chlorinating directly in the refugees' cans. Indeed, we cannot do massive chlorination in the tanks because 60% of the water produced is consumed by livestock and must not be chlorinated.
Around 2:30pm we would travel back to Guereda, to return before nightfall which falls around 5pm. All that remained was to unload the equipment, take stock of the day and the accounts (including any local purchases for the needs of the project and processing the weekly payroll) with the team, and prepare the next day before a well-deserved rest.
Training the team responsible for chlorinating the water and disinfecting the drums © Roland Couprie/MSF
In response to the refugee crisis in Sudan, MSF has scaled up its activities in the region to respond to urgent health and humanitarian needs. Since February 2024, MSF has been operating in Iriba with a clinic in Touloum refugee camp, where outpatient consultations are offered five days a week. Services include nutritional care, sexual and reproductive healthcare, mental health support, and care for survivors of sexual violence. Cases requiring hospitalisation are referred to Iriba district hospital, which MSF supports, including in the emergency, maternity and neonatal units.
In Touloum, MSF completed three boreholes, which are now connected and operational, significantly improving the water supply for refugees. In Iridimi camp, MSF finalized the connections of the boreholes, adding approximately 150,000 liters of water per day to the network. In Am Nabak, improvements have been made to the network, although the additional amount of water remains difficult to assess due to poor management of the system. Furthermore, since the influx of refugees in Birak and Koulbous, MSF has been supporting water transport efforts, setting up a system to fill two 25,000-liter trucks rented by UNHCR, which deliver water to the camp extensions.
Since July 2024, MSF has also been present at the Tine border crossing point , where the number of weekly refugee arrivals has fluctuated widely before recently stabilizing at around 100 people. Teams there carry out medical screenings, vaccinations, malnutrition assessments and referrals to therapeutic centres. In the Tine transit camp, MSF runs a mobile clinic three times a week, provides water daily and distributes essential non-food items such as buckets, lotas (a type of container) and soap. Catch-up vaccination campaigns also target host communities in the Tine areas of responsibility.
The situation has intensified in areas such as Birak and Koulbous, where more than 40,000 people, including war wounded transferred to Abéché, have crossed the border since late September 2024. In response, MSF has launched mobile clinics and environmental health activities to address urgent needs.
