Water Aid has launched WashWatch, a new website to see how different countries are doing in the race to create acceptable water and sanitation systems. Ghana, where we have worked scores 17/20 for water and 13/20 for sanitation. Mali, where we are working now scores 6/20 for water and 16/20 for sanitation. Both countries are doing well compared to other western Africa countries, many of whom score 0/20 for sanitation and lower for water. Unfortunately the story of 0/20 for sanitation is common in most of Africa. Ghana and Mali are maybe doing better because of the relative stability of the country and the willingness of governments to work towards a better water future. Also the presence of Water Aid in both countries must make a difference.
Water, Sanitation and the Millennium Development Goals
The Foundation for Community Inspiration offers you a way for you to help end poverty. To do this the Foundation follows the advice of the Millennium Project which was set up to figure out the best way of ending poverty. The Millennium Project was set up by the United Nations in order to provide the most effective recommendations towards ending poverty and it works towards the well known Millennium Development Goals which aim to reduce poverty significantly by 2015. The Foundation for Community Inspiration is now focusing on working towards completion of a large number of these goals through the simple method of providing water and sanitation to communities in Africa.
Water and sanitation contribute to 5 of the 8 Millennium Development Goals.
- End Hunger – By reducing the number of parasites in the body, clean water and sanitation
- significantly improve nutritional intake. Nutritional status is the defining measure of hunger worldwide. By improving nutrition, we start to end hunger.
- Universal Education – By reducing the need for children to spend hours fetching water, children can attend school. Also girls are encouraged to go to school because of the available of toilet facilities.
- Gender Equality – is improved because women have responsibility, control and status over the Water Wells and so gain more say in the community
- Child Health – is improved because the nutritional health of the children is improved, and nutrition is a key factor in the healthy development of children under five.
- Maternal Health – Maternal health is also improved through the nutrition of the mother. The mother who is healthy produces a healthier offspring.
The Foundation is currently raising money for water and sanitation programs in Mali. These water and sanitation programs are carried out by established experts in the water and sanitation field, ‘Water Aid’. We encourage you to donate to this program. We hope that you feel strongly about ending poverty and that you consider water and sanitation to be an effective way of contributing towards this.
To feel more confident about donating to this cause, please see our previous completed work in Ghana. The Ghana Central Region Program aimed to help a community in Ghana provide better accommodation for schooling as well as a much wanted community centre facility. The Ghana Central Region Program page will show you more about how we successfully completed the program.
Please donate to our Mali program which is helping end poverty.
Life in Africa
A good article which I thought was worth reading from http://cozay.com, http://cozay.com/AFRICA.php talked a little more about the effects of water amongst other things on daily life for most Africans. It says ’Most of the streams in Africa are full of water-borne diseases such as river blindness, sleeping sickness, diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid, and other water based diseases like guinea worm, and Bilharzias. Malaria (water-related disease) kills people in record numbers in Sub-Saharan African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leon, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Togo, etc. Guinea worm disease for example is a major health problem in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Due to water scarcity in certain parts of Northern and Eastern Africa, most village people in these areas suffer from water-scarce diseases like trachoma and scabies. ‘ The article goes on to talk about the difficulties on living in Africa. I thought it might be worth a read.
An Integrated Approach is Needed
‘There is a Genuine risk that the Millenium Development Goals will not be met’ according to water Aids Policy and Research sector. The lack of success is blamed at a single sector approach and not looking at a wider integrated picture.
‘Progress in health and education is dependent on access to safe water and effective sanitation. And yet the failure to recognise this interrelationship means that global spending on health and education has nearly doubled since 1990 while the share allocated to water and sanitation has contracted.’
The target to halve the proportion of people living without access to water and sanitation is wat of track and looks at arriving 71 years late. The economic costs of failing to implement the water targets each year are around $38 billion. The problem say water aid is that rich countries tend to follow single issue plans to help when an all round effort is needed.
For example there are high drop out rates of girls going to school, even where there are high enrollment rates due to lack of water and sanitation. For examples girls spend hours collecting water, and don’t want to face embarrassement of menstruation in schools.
In a different area little action has been taken on diarrhoea, a water bourne disease while measles which is stopped by injections has ben improved by 75%.
Life is looking up in Nafadji
The following is an excerpt from a water aid story from a Mali, a program being supported through www.f4ci.co.uk.
Awa carries water home to her family. 51 year old Awa lives in Nafadji, home to a community whose lives used to be blighted by the erratic water supply. There were wells in the village, but they were prone to drying up in the hot season. This left the women and children, who were responsible for water collection, with the choice between buying water from vendors at exorbitant prices they could scarcely afford or queuing for hours on end at the nearest alternative water source, a 1.5km walk away. “If we collected the water ourselves we had to queue for a very long time – usually around one hour for a 20 litre bucket of water. Going back and forth collecting water would take all day. Sometimes we would go at night when the queues were less long.” says Awa.
On top of the availability problems of water, the community had to contend with the fact the water sources weren’t protected, leaving them open to contamination. Poor sanitation compounded the problem – pools of dirty water would stagnate in the street and the makeshift latrines would overflow, adding sewage to the stagnant pools. The inevitable result was widespread incidences of disease throughout the community, with the most vulnerable falling ill the most. Awa explained: “If a child fell ill it was normal because that is how we lived. It was not unusual for children to die. There was so much illness and everything was on the shoulders of women. There was so much stress which can lead to conflict.” However, life has turned around in Nafadji since the community worked with WaterAid’s partner Jigi to set up a reliable water supply in the village, clean up the village by building proper latrines and drainage and learn about safer hygiene behaviour.
Awa described the impact the new waterpoint has had on their lives: Awa at the new waterpoint. “Now we are free. Before we spent all day fetching water. Children used to get water and they didn’t have time for learning. Now they are at school. “They love going to school. We have time to do the housework, cleaning and also small business. Nafadji women can go out first thing in the morning to go to market and sell things. Some women sell vegetables: aubergines, cabbages and tomatoes and some make soap to sell. If women work, everything works. “I am training as a health worker. And some of my neighbours are training to take on other development roles. It is due to the development of the village there is lots of training and the whole village is so much more dynamic. We want to act. And the whole process of getting access to safe water and toilets has made us feel like more of a team. We have advanced very much.” More time to care Momo Niare from Nefadji, Bamako. Momo Niare says: “Before the project, we spent most of the time going to get water from (private) taps a long way away. Most of the wells here were dry, or else they were polluted. “There was a lot of diarrhoea and malaria, and water was too far away for older people to get to a well. Now there is so much more time for caring for the family and much less sickness.”
An example of a Water Project
The following video shows a picture of a bore hole water supply to a village in Africa. This is the sort of thing we are trying to achieve in Mali with our Mali Program. A bore hole can supply several hundred to several thousand people. It can cost between £500 and £5000 depending upon the location and serve around 5000 people in the villages around. Bore holes can only be built in certain places, usually where the water table is not to deep and the supply of the water is clean. When building a bore hole you can often either pay a local firm a small amount to drill once and if there is no water you get nothing or you can pay an increased amount so that they keep drilling until you hit water.
How We Managed the Ghana Program
The Foundation for Community Inspiration visited Ghana twice in order to manage its first project the Ghana Central Region Program to completion (See Here). The visited focused on the Central Regions of Ghana in some Pineapple plantation based villages. The villages all worked for local British food producer Blue Skies, and while helped by the company, needed more in development terms in order to grow. The foundation worked with Blue Skies and some leading UK schools from Sheffield to create a community centre which was the primary choice of the citizens of the four villages. The center was able in particular to mean it could be doubled up as a kinder garten for small children meaning they could be taught right next to where they live rather than some miles away.
The village community had already dug some of the foundations for the community center and in doing so had shared some of the cost of completion and showed a determination for the new center. The center was eventually completed despite some turbulence in the exchange rates and was completed using the management system carried out by the Blue Skies factory.
Finances came from funds raised by the schools, a significant sum from company Private General Practice Services and individual amounts from individual donors.
Two visits were carried out, the first to assess what could be done and to gain an understanding of the environment we were working in, during which we did some studies on how to best help end poverty, and the second visit was with some members of the schools to develop relationships between the communities and ourselves in the UK.
We built relationships with the staff at the Blue Skies factory who were able to help manage the program successfully to completion.
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