Rehabilitation Project
The 500 people of the Bainomugisa Community struggle to access sufficient water. They waste hours each day collecting water, making it nearly impossible to accomplish the other important things they must do in a day.
"The distance to this waterpoint is very far from my home, about 2 km (1.25 miles), making it tiresome and hectic. I hope that the proposed project will help us reduce the distance we walk to the water point and save on the time spent [collecting water]," said Victoria Kalisa, a 39-year-old housewife (shown below).
The primary water source the people of Bainomugisa rely on is an unprotected spring, but it presents challenges. It is far away, requiring people's time and physical energy to collect and haul water. Flooding at the waterpoint causes further delays and makes collecting water uncomfortable. Worst of all, due to the spring's deteriorating construction, the water quality of what people are working so hard to collect is highly questionable.
Without the benefit of clean water access, daily life for Victoria is tiring and burdensome, and she feels the impacts in several ways. She often does not have enough water to bathe, affecting her hygiene. Her daily accomplishments in her garden are diminished, affecting how much food she can produce because she has to cut her work time short to travel and find water to collect.
There is an alternative water option, an unprotected well (seen below), but that is also a couple of miles away. And collecting water there takes even more time than from the spring since it is overcrowded. And during the rainy season, the shallow well becomes unusable when it floods, contaminating the water.
Eight-year-old Lawrence, who lives with his older siblings in the community, faces serious water challenges daily. Lawrence can be seen below, collecting water from the unprotected spring.
"We have to come back [from] school early and collect water to cook food and wash our uniforms. However, sometimes we fail because [by] the time we go to collect water in the evening hours, people are already many and [we] end up going back with empty jerrycans, this makes them miss out on meals at times and washing their uniforms become hard," said Lawrence.
He continued, "One day, I was nearly knocked [over] by a boda rider [motorcycle taxi] as I was coming from the well because we pass on a busy road as we go to the well. This puts our lives at risk of accidents."
Installing the well will enable people like Victoria and Lawrence to have sufficient water to meet their daily needs instead of being challenged to find enough water and give them the freedom to focus on other things.
Note: This water point can only serve 300 people per day. We are working with the community to identify other water solutions that will ensure everyone has access to safe and reliable drinking water.
The Proposed Solution, Determined Together...
At The Water Project, everyone has a part in conversations and solutions. We operate in transparency, believing it benefits everyone. We expect reliability from one another as well as our water solutions. Everyone involved makes this possible through hard work and dedication.
In a joint discovery process, community members determine their most advantageous water solution alongside our technical experts. Read more specifics about this solution on the What We're Building tab of this project page. Then, community members lend their support by collecting needed construction materials (sometimes for months ahead of time!), providing labor alongside our artisans, sheltering and feeding the builders, and supplying additional resources.
Water Access for Everyone
This water project is one piece in a large puzzle. In Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, we're working toward complete coverage of reliable, maintained water sources that guarantee public access now and in the future within a 30-minute round trip for each community, household, school, and health center. One day, we hope to report that this has been achieved!
Training on Health, Hygiene & More
With the community's input, we've identified topics where training will increase positive health outcomes at personal, household, and community levels. We'll coordinate with them to find the best training date. Some examples of what we train communities on are:
- Improved hygiene, health, and sanitation habits
- Safe water handling, storage & treatment
- Disease prevention and proper handwashing
- Income-generation
- Community leadership, governance, & election of a water committee
- Operation and maintenance of the water point
A Community-Wide Approach
In Uganda, we require that the community pledges to stop any open defecation practices before we install the water project — meaning that every household must construct and use a latrine. This will help prevent the spread of diseases and start them on a new path toward better hygiene and sanitation alongside their new water source.
To help with this, we assign a Community Development Officer (CDO) to each community, who encourages each household to install a handwashing facility, animal-keeping structures, a garbage pit, and a drying rack for dishes. Each of these homestead components prevent commonly spread diseases in their own way.
We implement something called a Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach, which involves setting up multiple meetings during which community members assess their own hygiene and sanitation practices in hopes of creating long-term change. During these sessions, leaders naturally emerge and push the community to recognize current unhealthy behaviors that affect the entire community.
