Our field officers reported seeing algae, dead leaves, and animal waste floating in the water used by Kafusi's 185 people every day. The water itself looks milky and semi-opaque. It's no wonder that drinking the water has infested every household with cases of typhoid and chronic diarrhea.
"As a beneficiary of this spring, the water situation has affected me," said 44-year-old businesswoman Rose Mulongo (in the photo below), who sells eggs to local schools to earn her living. "I am always suffering from diarrhea. [The] first time, I thought that it was food poisoning. [I've come] to discover, after spending a lot of money on medication, [that] it was water from this source."
But it's not only ingesting the water that poses risks. To collect water, community members must balance on some rocks at the spring's mouth and scoop up jugs of water to pour into their jerrycans. The slippery algae and precarious position have caused injuries, especially among children and the community's elders.
"I fear going to the water source because there [was] a day I stepped in the water with bare feet and something bit my feet," said 10-year-old Peace M, shown collecting water in the below photo. "From that time, I have felt a lot of pain on my left leg, and whenever I go to the hospital, they tell me that they can't see the problem."
This water collection method also eats up a lot of time that could be funneled into more productive tasks. Community members queue up at peak water collection times to wait for their turn to fetch water. When fetching water takes a long time, community members gather less of it, which means they do less cooking, cleaning, and drinking overall.
Increased [water] collection time has also been shown to negatively affect the educational success of students, who report being late to school, lack of morale and ability to focus and fatigue due to their water collection responsibilities. - Policy Futures in Education journal
With better health, less toil, and more time, the community members of Kafusi will be better equipped to overcome obstacles.
What We Can Do:
Protecting the spring will help provide access to cleaner and safer water and reduce the time people have to spend to fetch it. 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 a task predominantly carried out by women and young girls. Protecting the spring and offering training and support will, therefore, help empower the female members of the community by freeing up more of their time and energy to engage and invest in income-generating activities and their education.
Training on Health, Hygiene, COVID-19, and More
To hold trainings during the pandemic, we work closely with both community leaders and the local government to approve small groups to attend training. We ask community leaders to invite a select yet representative group of people to attend training who will then act as ambassadors to the rest of the community to share what they learn. We also communicate our expectations of physical distancing and wearing masks for all who choose to attend.
The training will focus on improved hygiene, health, and sanitation habits in this community. We will also have a dedicated session on COVID-19 symptoms, transmission routes, and prevention best practices.
With the community’s input, we will identify key leverage points where they can alter their practices at the personal, household, and community levels to affect change. This training will help to ensure participants have the knowledge they need about healthy practices and their importance to make the most of their water point as soon as water is flowing.
Our team of facilitators will use a variety of methods to train community members. Some of these methods include participatory hygiene and sanitation transformation, asset-based community development, group discussions, handouts, and demonstrations at the spring.
One of the most important issues 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 is consumed. We and the community strongly believe that all of these components will work together to improve living standards here, which will help to unlock the potential for these community members to live better, healthier lives.
We will then conduct a small series of follow-up trainings before transitioning to our regularly scheduled support visits throughout the year.
Training will result in the formation of a water user committee, elected by their peers, that will oversee the operations and maintenance of the spring. The committee 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 channels. The fence will keep out destructive animals and unwanted waste, and the drainage will keep the area’s mosquito population at a minimum.