Water is gold for us

Water is gold for us

World Vision visited rural Senegal to see how low cost and clean water is transforming the life of a community.

“I was born without water and I grew up without water. Now we can wash and cook; now we are not tired and we are even able to do economic activities.”

What is commonplace for many is miraculous for others. Khady Ndaw says that for as long as she can remember, she has had to fetch and carry water.

“We had to walk [for two hours] to fetch water. Everyone had to do it,” she adds, pointing to her children.

Khady rubs her bare feet in the moist sand where she has started to grow a dozen lettuces and several rows of aubergine and tomatoes.

“I never thought this would happen,” she says.

Water scarcity

Khady lives in the village of Keur Babou, in the heart of Senegal’s Kaffrine region, some four hours drive from the capital city, Dakar. Senegal is a semi-arid country with poor soil and a fragile ecosystem. Sitting just under the Sahara desert, at the doorway to Sub-Saharan Africa, water scarcity is a reality for Senegal and its neighbouring countries, collectively known as the Sahel.

The fact that Khady has the time and energy to harvest a small amount of vegetables, which she sells locally, is a great accomplishment indeed. It is a visible sign of how she and her community have been transformed by the introduction of clean and low cost water right into the centre of their village.

For four years, World Vision has been working with Khady’s community to slowly provide one cluster of villages after another with access to safe water.

Rural community

“How can people ever be healthy when they have nowhere to wash and children constantly have diarrhea from drinking dirty water?” asks Maurice Faye, who is responsible for World Vision’s work in the area.

He explains how, following discussion with the community, the existing infrastructure was identified before boreholes were dug, metre after metre of piping laid and water towers constructed to put an entire rural community on-line to clean water.

Only one remaining cluster of villages is still waiting to be connected to standpipes; completion of the work is expected soon. In total 52 villages and 25,000 people, 60% of whom are children, now have access to clean water.

Free a woman, free a child

It is not only livelihoods such as Khady’s that are being strengthened by the water initiative. One of the startling effects of the project has been a dramatic increase in the number of children in the community going to school.

In just four years, school attendance rates have risen tenfold from 319 to more than 3,000 and many of the students are girls. It makes sense: if a child is no longer enslaved to searching for and carrying water, they will be free to attend school.

Young people are also reported to be staying in their villages to grow crops instead of leaving to find work elsewhere.

But perhaps most shocking of all are reports that women no longer lose babies to miscarriage or early labour as a result of having to haul water from deep wells.

Toilets

In Senegal the average household has access to 15 litres of water a day. According to the UN, the 1.1 billion people in the world that lack access to clean water each use just five litres of water a day – a tenth of what rich countries use daily just to flush their toilets.

As in many developing countries, in Senegal water is often drawn from an unprotected well at best, or, at worst, a common watering hole such as a pond. This leaves people vulnerable to health problems caused by poor water and sanitation.

In Khady’s community, a basin of clean water (around 25 litres) is sold for five francs (10 cents) – well below the national average.

Marriages and baptisms

The money pays for the water plus electricity and repairs for the pumps and is collected by a trained village monitor chosen from the community. The monitor unlocks the village standpipe in the mornings and early evenings for the villagers to collect their water.

Representatives from the local community sit on village management committees to give villagers ownership over the running of the water systems. The boreholes, once paid for by World Vision, are maintained by the State and run by a nominated community member.

An interesting side effect of the water project has been the collaboration and friendship built amongst neighbouring villages. This happens when a number of villages are brought together in a cluster, each with their respective standpipe but sourced by a common borehole and water tower; this requires joint stewardship and a therefore a joint committee.

“The water has built fraternity between villages and now at marriages and baptisms everyone knows each other,” comments Babaka N’dije, who sits on a village committee.

“Five years ago, no one knew each other. Now we can invite people here and they come.

"Water is gold for us.”