Musango Community 2

Most people are farmers in this part of Musango, specializing in maize and groundnuts. Some plant sugarcane, since that is easily sold to local sugar factories. Many of these same farmers also raise dairy cows. All daylight is spent on the farm, while the evening hours are for selling produce and milk at the trading center.

Some children go to school, while others stay at home and play with friends while their parents are on the farm.

Water Situation

Community members tell us that Dawi Spring provides water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning. The water is clearly contaminated, with algae growing on the surface. Community members dunk jerrycans under the surface and bring home water to store in large 100-liter barrels.

Children suffer the most after drinking contaminated water, contracting sicknesses like typhoid and cholera.

"We have used dirty water for a very long time, and this has caused lots of diseases for this community. People eat well, but water is still a big problem," Mr. Mapesa Daraja said.

Someone has to walk extremely far, more than two kilometers, to a neighboring community's protected spring, when a family is in dire need of safe drinking water.

Sanitation Situation

More than half of the households in this area use pit latrines made of soil and mud. Even fewer own other sanitation tools like dish racks and clotheslines and none have hand-washing stations.

Here's what we're going to do about it:

Hygiene and Sanitation Training

Community members will attend hygiene and sanitation training for at least two days. This training will ensure participants have the knowledge they need about healthy practices and their importance. The facilitator plans to use PHAST (Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation), CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation), ABCD (Asset-Based Community Development), group discussions, handouts, and demonstrations at the spring. One of the most important topics we plan to cover is the handling, storage, and treatment of water. Having a clean water source will be extremely helpful, but it is useless if water gets contaminated by the time it’s consumed. Hand-washing will also be a big topic.

Training will also result in the formation of a committee that will oversee operations and maintenance at the spring. They will enforce proper behavior around the spring and delegate tasks that will help preserve the site, such as building a fence and digging proper drainage. The fence will keep out destructive animals, and the drainage will keep the area’s mosquito population at a minimum.

Sanitation Platforms

On the final day of training, participants will select five families that should benefit from new latrine floors.

Training will also inform the community and selected families on what they need to contribute to make this project a success. They must mobilize locally available materials, such as bricks, clean sand, hardcore, and ballast. The five families chosen for sanitation platforms must prepare by sinking a pit for the sanitation platforms to be placed over. All community members must work together to make sure that accommodations and food are always provided for the work teams.

Spring Protection

Protecting the spring will ensure that the water is safe, adequate and secure. Construction will keep surface runoff and other contaminants out of the water. With the community’s high involvement in the process, there should be a good sense of responsibility and ownership for the new clean water source.

Fetching water is predominantly a female role, done by both women and young girls. Protecting the spring and offering training and support will therefore help empower the female members of the community by giving them more time and efforts to engage and invest in income-generating activities.

Project Updates

July, 2020: COVID-19 Prevention Training Update at Musango Community, Dawi Spring

Our teams are working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Join us in our fight against the virus while maintaining access to clean, reliable water.

10 steps of handwashing lesson

We are carrying out awareness and prevention trainings on the virus in every community we serve. Very often, our teams are the first (and only) to bring news and information of the virus to rural communities like Musango, Kenya.

We trained more than 19 people on the symptoms, transmission routes, and prevention of COVID-19. Due to public gathering concerns, we worked with trusted community leaders to gather a select group of community members who would then relay the information learned to the rest of their family and friends.

Handwashing with a tippy tap

We covered essential hygiene lessons:

- Demonstrations on how to build a simple handwashing station

- Proper handwashing technique

- The importance of using soap and clean water for handwashing

- Cleaning and disinfecting commonly touched surfaces including at the water point.

We covered COVID-19-specific guidance in line with national and international standards:

- Information on the symptoms and transmission routes of COVID-19

- What social distancing is and how to practice it

- How to cough into an elbow

- Alternative ways to greet people without handshakes, fist bumps, etc.

- How to make and properly wear a facemask.

Homemade face mask tutorial

During training, we installed a new handwashing station with soap near the community’s water point, along with a sign with reminders of what we covered.

Due to the rampant spread of misinformation about COVID-19, we also dedicated time to a question and answer session to help debunk rumors about the disease and provide extra information where needed.

Complete mask made at training

Participants said they particularly appreciated the practical session on mask making. Carolyne Wamkhali said that the masks will not only help them prevent Coronavirus, but they will also put them on when in dusty environments and also when they cook in the village kitchens that have too much smoke.

Prevention reminders chart installed at the spring

We continue to stay in touch with this community as the pandemic progresses. We want to ensure their water point remains functional and their community stays informed about the virus.

How to cough and sneeze using the elbow

Water access, sanitation, and hygiene are at the crux of disease prevention. You can directly support our work on the frontlines of COVID-19 prevention in all of the communities we serve while maintaining their access to safe, clean, and reliable water.

July, 2019: Giving Update: Musango Community, Dawi Spring

A year ago, your generous donation enabled us to protect Dawi Spring for Musango Community in Kenya. The contributions of incredible monthly donors and others giving directly to The Water Promise allow our local teams to visit project sites throughout the year, strengthening relationships with communities and evaluating the water project over time. These consistent visits allow us to learn vital lessons and hear amazing stories. Read more…

May, 2018: Clean Water in Musango Community

Musango Community now has clean water! Dawi Spring has been transformed into a flowing source of clean water thanks to your donation. The spring is protected from contamination, five sanitation platforms have been provided for the community, and training has been given in sanitation and hygiene.

Knowledge is Power

We constantly kept in touch with our contact person in Musango, a respected leader named Alfred Mapesa. He was our voice when we were back in the office, moving from household to household telling people of the upcoming hygiene and sanitation training and its importance.

Everyone in the community was invited, but we strongly urged at least one representative of each household attend. There was a total of 11 community members who met us under the shade of a tree nearby the ongoing spring project. This turnout was lower than we expected since there was a recent death in the community.

Training participants pose with the notebooks and pens we gave them for taking notes.

We covered several topics including leadership and governance; operation and maintenance of the spring; healthcare; family planning; immunizations; the spread of disease and prevention. We also covered water treatment methods, personal care like handwashing, environmental hygiene, hygiene promotion, and many other things.

A woman practices the ten steps of handwashing the trainer just demonstrated.

Participants were very interested in our water pollution session and felt enlightened to know that many things they've been doing contribute to the poor quality of their drinking water. We want to make sure the way community members handle their water does not contaminate it later. Participants couldn't believe all the ways an open, dirty water container can pollute clean water.

The group walked over to the spring to watch demonstrations on care and management.

Mrs. Josephine Ingoka is a new mother who was thrilled to learn how to keep a healthy environment for her baby.

"I have really learned a lot from this training, especially on hygiene. All along, I have thought teething causes diarrhea in toddlers. I now know how to handle my baby when she starts teething," she shared.

Sanitation Platforms

All five sanitation platforms have been installed. These five families are happy about this milestone of having a private latrine of their own and are optimistic that people will no longer leave waste outdoors. We are continuing to encourage families to finish building walls and roofs over their new latrine floors.

These stable, flat latrine floors will be worlds easier to clean than the old, rotten floors community members had to balance on.

Spring Protection

Community members provided all locally available construction materials, e.g bricks, wheelbarrows of clean sand, wheelbarrows of ballast, fencing poles and gravel. Accommodations and meals were provided for the artisan, too.

Men helped our artisan by transporting materials to the spring site.

Men and women lent their strength to the artisan to help him with manual labor. The spring area was excavated to create space for setting the foundation of polyethylene, wire mesh and concrete. After the base had been set, both wing walls and the headwall were set in place using brickwork. The discharge pipe was fixed low in place through the headwall to direct the water from the reservoir to the drawing area.

Community members dug drainage behind the spring box to keep rainwater from flooding the area.

As the wing walls and headwall were curing, the stairs were set and ceramic tiles were fixed directly below the discharge pipe. This protects the concrete from the erosive force of the falling water and beautifies the spring. The process of plastering the headwall and wing walls on both sides reinforces the brickwork and prevents water from the reservoir from seeping through the walls and allows pressure to build in the collection box to push water up through the discharge pipe.

The source area was filled up with clean hardcore and covered with a polyethylene membrane to eliminate any potential sources of contamination. It took about two weeks of patience for the concrete to dry.

When water was directed through the discharge pipe, a celebration broke out. This community was so thrilled that they surprised the field officer with a feast of chicken and ugali (corn meal) when she arrived to give them the okay to start using this transformed water source.

We shared smiles, laughter, and song with community members as they fetched their first containers of clean water from Dawi Spring.

March, 2018: Musango Community Project Underway

Dirty water from Dawi Spring is making people in Musango Community sick. Thanks to your generosity, we’re working to install a clean water point and much more.

Get to know your community through the narrative and pictures we’ve posted, and read about this water, sanitation and hygiene project. We look forward to reaching out with more good news!