On the NBA pre show recently Charles Barkley pledged 45 grand to a NBA players charity to build a well in Africa. That seems like a lot of money for one well. Labor in Africa is cheap, digging holes in the ground is a very mature technology all you need is an auger and some pipes.
Why would it cost so much to dig a well?
Depends a lot on the depth, capacity, and geological situation. My residential well was drilled through rock, not dug, to 330 ft, which is pretty shallow in some parts of the world. It cost me $10,000 forty years ago, so $45K doesn’t sound unreasonable without knowing the details.
I’d also wonder if the project wasn’t just simply digging a hole until one hits water, but also then making said hole into a fully-functioning well (i.e., installing a pumping system).
From the charity’s page:
“Each well costs $45,000 to install, and just one can serve up to 7,500 people.”
Add in the required size of the well, possibly some basic filtration and purification, surveying to find a source that will be sustainable long term, and the fact that it’s probably being built somewhere with less infrastructure than we’re used to and the number seems …
Impossible to judge for me, since it’s way outside my field of knowledge. 
Augers don’t work very well past about 30 feet. I don’t know a lot about drilling in africa but I would assume their water table is deeper then that. The well on my propery is exposed to the aquifer from 80-180 feet and that is considered very shallow.
To drill a well you need a crew (typically 3 guys), a drilling rig, some existing water or compressed air source. Along with the two to three strings of casing. It takes about a day to drill and complete the well and then you need the pump and tubing to make it work. $45k is certainly high for a well around here but the technology is commonly available and there are multiple competing companies. Based on people donating to drill the wells in Africa I would assume that drilling wells is generally less common then it is here so it doesn’t surprise me that it is more expensive.
That’s a good point of clarification – it isn’t just a residential well, for one family, but one big enough to provide the water for a good-sized town.
To serve 7500 people I have to guess they are talking more than the household well. There would have to be some kind of distribution system. I assume people using the system would need water every day and 7500 a day is 300 an hour, 24 hours a day.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the wells that did just require a couple of guys, some pipes and an auger got made by the locals years ago already.
The projects that people are fundraising for are much larger and more complicated; the water’s too deep, so can’t be pumped out with a hand pump or requires more equipment and expertise to build than is available locally. They’re not just digging a hole you can chuck a bucket on a rope down, the money’s needed for things like a pump, a generator to run the pump, storage tanks and filtration systems, all set up somewhere with little infrastructure. Some of the work probably can be done by unskilled cheap labour, but expertise and equipment is going to be coming from out of area, not so cheap or easy.
A lot of well-meaning dollars have been spent drilling wells in Africa over the decades. The biggest problem with these projects is that once the well had been built, the benefactors moved on, leaving no maintenance parts or trained local personnel behind to do repairs. I’d be curious to know if this latest effort has taken that into consideration or if this is just another feel-good project that is doomed to failure (again).
…making sure it doesn’t contain arsenic or other heavy metals…
According to the Guardia Civil, a national Spanish police body who is in charge of environmental protection among other things, people building wells illegally is one of their most frequent incidents. The immense majority of such wells never hit water: people who can’t be arsed get a building permit also can’t be arsed hire a geologist or make sure they have the right equipment for the job. Merely knowing where to dig/drill and how to do it is already a more complicated task than most people think.
Keep in mind some places in Africa (usually where the people are) have a rainy season where it pours buckets (inches per day) and then 9 or 10 months wehere there could be absolutely no rain. Not surprising if the water table is very low much of the year.
Also, to get heavy construction equipment in Africa- presumably the majority if not all is imported from the West - the local governments tend to tax heavily any imports (on the theory people who can afford to bring them in can afford taxes). There is not a lot of demand and so not a lot of equipment floating round for hire. The roads to get equipment where it’s going can be bad, the locations that need wells could be a long way off the main roads, all meaning many extra days of renting the equipment.
This isn’t like construction in a large urban area in the First World.
Boy, howdy, to all of that. Logistics in Africa can be a nightmare and equipment procurement is often non-existent. “Roads” to villages are often just sandy tracks across a forbidding landscape; barring that, you navigate by landmarks and compass and hope you have a good guide. After arrival, you have to post guards on the equipment and parts to avoid theft. This is nothing against the people who live there; abject poverty dictates lives in that part of the world. Value added tax (VAT) can be upwards of 20-25% on materials and equipment, and contractors will likely not have the sanctuary of the diplomatic pouch to ship things in. To me $45K is not bad at all.
When nobody around owns an automobile, there’s no great urgency to ensure the local road (or, dirt path) is passable by automobiles. You can dismount and push that bicycle across a deep ditch if you are fortunate enough to own a bicycle. Even during road building in Africa, I have seen a tractor trying to pull a small truck out of a deep dip in the detour road - it got stuck because it became hung up on the crest of the rise, one rear wheel was in the air and spinning, so no traction on the other. .
As a tourist in East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, specifically) in 2016 I was surprised (from a Westerner’s perspective) by how much construction work I saw being done with nothing but basic hand tools. I remember seeing a guy at a gas station that was under construction digging a big hole, presumably for the underground tanks, using just an ordinary shovel.
Here’s a break down of costs by a well-driller in Nebraska. Remember, that’s for a well serving a single family. And don’t forget the cost of transporting all that drilling equipment on primitive roads around Africa, and a lot more permanent equipment than an augur and pipes.
Equipment is expensive, labor is cheap, and there are always those willing to work for even the small amounts paid.
Yes. The place I stayed in Africa hired a steam shovel (what are they really called?) to dig an Olympic swimming pool sized pond for water collection in time for the rainy season. But that was the exception- they said that generally they’d rather spend the same money on wages to support the locals than to some rich equipment owner.
Do not forget the bribes that need to be paid.