Every water solution carries its own story.
“The washing machine, piped gas, running water and all these mundane household technologies enabled women to enter the labour market, which then meant that they had fewer children, had them later, invested more in each of them, especially female children. That changed their bargaining positions within the household and in wider society, giving women votes and endless changes. It has transformed the way we live.””
As Unicef states so well, water collection is by and large the job of women and the burden on them is overwhelming. Read more from the UN here. In Sub Saharan Africa 200,000,000 hours are spent each day collecting water, that’s 40,000,000,000 hours/year!
Given that women raise 75% of the crops, raise 50% of the livestock and yet collect only 10% of the income and own a mere 1% of the assets in Africa, our aim is to eliminate water as a burden in their lives.
We are literally saving lives every day. Imagine your life totally dependent on finding water, any water, every day, day after day after day. The challenge is real; the reward for doing something: LIFE!
We empower women to solve local water problems
An old woman, Priscilla Bari’ba, is between 65-70 years old. She lives in a small grass-thatched house with farming land around the homestead. The woman has three daughters who are all married and live with their husbands. Priscilla is a widow who lost her husband long ago, and as a result, she is living at the old homestead that belonged to her late father. The late husband's relative removed her property from her husband’s house.
Her village, the Logo Community, had a good functioning borehole. But when I visited the area, the hand pump was not functioning well; it took 30-45 minutes to fill one jerry can of 20 liters; for an old woman like Bari’ba, it takes an hour to fill her 10-liter plastic bucket of water.
Her health condition has deteriorated, and she cannot carry a jerry can of 20 liters on her head anymore.
The water problem is not only for older people; it is a general issue; other water sources, such as wells and running streams, have dried up. This has forced small boys such as Peter Lomoro (6 years old) and his friend Michael Juma (5 years old) to move along this busy dirt road for 3 km to look for water for washing their school uniforms and taking baths because water collected by the mothers and the elder sisters are used only for preparing food and our domestic work.
I remember the promises made by the international communities, IMF, World Bank, Donor Nations, and MDG that by the year 2012, 85% of the people who were living in the rural areas would have clean and safe water for drinking - that has not happened here in South Sudan. In South Sudan, most people did not feel the nation's dividends of peace and independence because of the lack of basic services rendered to them.
And so we train women to fix hundreds of boreholes every year. Changing the lives of women like Pricilla and hundreds of thousands more each and every year.
