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Siyileni Mandala is unimpressed as she tips out more than half the water from her 20-litre bucket before I can lift it off the ground, never mind on to my head.

The 15-year-old schoolgirl fetches water for her family three times a day – before school, after school and before nightfall. By tradition, this is a job for girls and, as the only daughter in her family of five children, it is up to Siyileni to make sure there is enough for drinking, cooking and washing.

She admits that there are days when her workload means she does not make it to school in a neighbouring village. This is a serious problem across Malawi. School attendance among girls is low. Government statistics show that 10.5 per cent of girls drop out each year compared with 8.4 per cent of boys. Almost a quarter of girls of primary school age do not attend at all, while 60 per cent of those enrolled do not attend regularly.

Letter from the Editor

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• Pump Aid website

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Pump Aid, the overseas charity supported by The Times in this year’s appeal, knows very well that supplying a reliable source of clean, easy-to-draw drinking water has an impact way beyond the health and safety of rural communities. Before the charity installed its elephant pump in Chikaunga two months ago women and girls spent up to six hours drawing up water from the open well with a two-litre tin can. The can had to be lowered into the well ten times to fill a standard 20-litre container, which they carry home on their heads.

The open well, which was dug in the 1930s by British colonists, served five villages and more than 1,000 people, who between them need about 10,000 litres a day to survive. Dozens of girls wasted many hours queueing up in the searing heat for their turn to draw the water – slow, backbreaking work – when they could have been at school.

So when Lesfati Jareki, the chief of Chikaunga, heard that a British charity was offering to build a new type of simple pump that would be ready to use within a day, guarantee a permanent supply of clean water and cut down dramatically the amount of time girls had to spend collecting water, he registered the village for the trial.

“Many girls give up going to school when they become 10 or 11. Their mothers and fathers work in the fields and they have to collect the water. It is not good for the future of the village,” he told The Times.

The pump, which requires only the turning of a handle, has cut the time they have to spend collecting water from six hours to two. When I visit, school has broken up for the summer. But Siyileni says the pump has already changed her life.

“My whole day was about getting the water. Some days I didn’t go to school because there were too many people and it took too long. Now everything is possible,” she said.

Siyileni and her friends gathered around the pump greet my offer to carry her bucket with hilarity. First, they roll up a damp scarf to put on my head. Then there is the humiliation of having to empty the bucket bit by bit until I can lift it unaided.

Eventually, when it is two thirds empty, I manage to hoist it up. The flat-bottomed container is remarkably stable and really only needs a hand to keep it balanced, although Malawian women use no hands at all.

Siyileni and I set off through the village in the midday sun. It is not long before my neck and back start to ache. But I am lucky. My new friend does not live in one of the villages three kilometres away that the pump serves. Her little house is less than 500m away. When we get there she relieves me of my burden and pours the water into an urn, shaded by thick cotton blankets. She then heads back to collect the water I couldn’t manage.