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Joseph Kpuie’s torn clothes are sticky with latex spilt from the rubber trees that he taps for a living. His fellow residents of Zinc Camp, a tiny community in the middle of the Liberian bush, pound cassava for food while the children play in the dirt. It all looks pretty desperate, but Mr Kpuie, 20, says: “This is a good place to live, with good people. Only the water here is bad.”

Child soldiers, blood diamonds and a civil war that took more than 250,000 lives have made Liberia synonymous with horror. Yet good things do happen here.

Last month, for instance, on the balcony of a hotel in the capital, Monrovia, there was a chance meeting between Ian Thorpe, founder of Pump Aid, and Zoe Pennue, the Minister in charge of public utilities. It emerged that Mr Pennue and AD Wright, a Liberian war refugee with whom we were travelling, knew each other of old.

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“AD was like a father to me. He used to force me to go to school,” said Mr Pennue, smiling wonderingly at Mr Wright and jabbing at the “reject call” button of his constantly ringing mobile phone.

The ice was broken and the Liberian authorities agreed in principle to Pump Aid’s plan to import its hugely effective sanitation and clean water programme to the country.

Pump Aid’s strategy is simple: train Africans how to build and maintain the charity’s own design of robust, easily maintained water pumps and latrines. It has already brought safe water and sanitation to more than a million people in Malawi and Zimbabwe and for six months it has been training about 80 Liberian refugees living in Ghana.

The next step is to investigate whether Grand Bassa, the region where many of the refugees are from, would make a suitable area for a Pump Aid pilot scheme.

In Buchanan, the regional capital, we learn that the only hospital relies on dirty, rarely chlorinated well-water. There are 40,000 people living here but only 29 water pumps – and 21 of these are broken. Parts are expensive and must be imported from India and there is no one qualified to replace them, so that leaves only one tap providing clean water for every 5,000 people.

There are no working public latrines in Buchanan so people must defecate where they can.

Is there anywhere particularly in need of clean water and sanitation, Mr Thorpe asks Christian Logan, a county planner. Mr Logan says: “Take a piece of paper, write the names of the districts, close your eyes, and pick one: we have no clean water supply throughout all of our country. Go anywhere.”

So 50 miles up a dirt road we stop, at random, at Zinc Camp. Joseph Kpuie emerges and shows us the creek on which the village relies for water and washing. He gestures at the barely flowing water and says: “It is full of germs. We keep drinking it but it is not good for the body. People get sickness because there are diseases in this water. We need pumps.”

Behind him, young boys leap into the water, hoping to be photographed.

As we bump back through the dust to Buchanan, Mr Thorpe says: “There is a huge, huge need here. After this visit, and meeting the minister, I would be quite hopeful that we will start operating. Over the next five years we could have a major impact.”

Under Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female head of state, Liberia has stable government, for now guaranteed by the presence of UN soldiers.

It costs Pump Aid £4.80 to provide each person it helps with clean water and disease-free sanitation facilities for life. There are 3.5 million people in this country: Mr Thorpe believes that Pump Aid could reach a million of them within five years. Good things can – and do – happen in Liberia.