It was, perhaps, in the village of Kalichero, not far from Lake Malawi, that I began to experience a change of heart. A rather beautiful young woman with a serenity that belied her years – to my astonishment I learnt that she was 20, married, already with two children – had walked over to introduce herself. Her name was Miriam Ibrahim and she was, she said (Pump Aid’s enthusiastic young instructor Maxwell translating) the chairwoman of the village pump committee. She would like me to see Kalichero’s former well, and their new one.

We crossed a road busy with cyclists, chickens, goats and lorries, to see the old well. Like most open wells, it was a mess. Bits of old string, the relics of broken rope-and-bucket arrangements, lay about. There was now no rope, but a series of torn plastic bags knotted together into a makeshift line, and no bucket but a cracked cooking oil container, sawn off at the neck. The well was deep, neatly dug and properly lined with mud bricks, but its rim was hardly raised above the dirty yard. How could it be, when women have to throw the bucket down and pull it up, back-breakingly?

Miriam demonstrated this with the cooking-oil container, which went banging down against the sides until it thudded into something that sounded like mud. Then up it came as Miriam tugged, sloshing half the contents down the well’s sides until it surfaced with a bit of brown water left in the bottom. This Miriam transferred into a bigger container she could carry (baby on back) on her head when full. In three words: slow, inefficient, filthy. Or: servitude, backache, diarrhoea.

We went over the road to the new well fitted with Pump Aid’s Elephant pump. “Try it,” said Miriam. I wound the winch vigorously – and the wrong way. No water gushed from the spout. Miriam smiled and, reversing the rotation, wound confidently.

Letter from the Editor

The global financial crisis means charities are struggling as never before to raise funds and meet a sudden surge in demand for their services

Multimedia

• Video: Corinne Bailey Rae on why she supports Pump Aid

• Video: Dermot Murnaghan on why he supports Action for Children

• Video: Sally Brampton explains why she supports Thrive

BACKGROUND

• Arrival of elephant pump trumpets a great day

• Green shoots of recovery

• Support three charities in our Christmas Appeal

• Who cares? I do

But there was only a trickle of clean water from the spout. Maxwell looked crestfallen – this was to have been, for me, the first demonstration in Malawi of the new low-tech technology. But Miriam smiled again. “That’s because news has travelled,” she said, “and everybody’s coming to this pump now, even from surrounding communities. They start before dawn. You’ve got to arrive early – or look out!”

As we spoke two women arrived with empty cans on their heads. “You will have to wait,” Miriam told them, not without pride. “Our well will refill in an hour or two.”

“Now we’ve put in this demonstration pump,” said Liz Maneya, Pump Aid’s impressive head of Malawian operations, “everyone wants it. It is becoming a victim of its own success.”

As we drove on to another village (Chibowa, down a long track through grotesque baobabs, trees that appear to have been stuck upside down in the ground, with their fat roots in the air) whose children fight for the privilege of being water-winders, whose new vegetable garden and small tree nursery have been established to take advantage of the splashed-over water, my change of heart intensified.

You see, I’d never really believed in overseas aid. I was born and raised in sub-Saharan Africa. I’ve seen the expensive machinery sent by kindly Europeans, rusting among villagers who, when it broke, couldn’t fix it. I’ve spoken to the well-meaning English bank managers off for a summer “digging a well in Tanzania” – as if the thing rural Africa was short of was unskilled labour.

And at the other end of the scale, I’ve seen the operations of huge, well-resourced NGOs whose 4x4s are always new and usually parked near the swankiest hotel in the capital city, and where millions seem to be spent writing strategy documents for each other and for their Western political sponsors whom they come to resemble even as they grow away from their customers: the myriad small subsistence farming communities.

And, time and again, the questions have resurfaced. How much of this is getting through – past the ever-hungry bureaucrats and the corrupt politicians? And if it gets through, how much of it is really what people in Africa need? Little, I always believed.

But as we bounced down the track to Chibowa this absolutist disbelief was crumbling. Pump Aid, a small British charity, had made three right judgments.

First: the need and the demand. Clean water. It’s just stupid to think Africans don’t care about clean water. Of course they do. They just can’t get it. However poor or uneducated, everyone in Africa knows polluted water spreads disease. So Pump Aid starts without any need to persuade people that they want what it’s offering. This isn’t mainly a matter of education.

Second: the means to supply the need. It must be cheap if it is to be replicated everywhere across the continent. It must be easy to repair, maintain and renew. This is so, so important in Africa, or all else fails.

But right at the core of Pump Aid’s programme are two key, brilliantly low-tech inventions: a latrine that gets closer to matching input with decomposition; and a pump that needs only rope, a plastic pipe, some rubber washers and a winding wheel.

Third: a bottom-heavy institutional structure. A tiny office in Britain, and on the continent a team of Africans, almost every one of whom is out there, most of the time, taking the technology and the idea to villages.

As we lurched back from Chibowa to the embarrassingly comfortable hotel by beautiful Lake Malawi, I made a resolution to do something that in a columnist you could almost call unprofessional: contribute personally to the cause I was reporting.

This Christmas I hope some of you may too.