Safe clean water for 6,000 people in rural Uganda

TRANSFORM AFRICA

GLOBALGIVING REPORT 4 – NOVEMBER 2016

We are delighted to provide our fourth Progress Update on our water borehole project in Mityana and Mubende Districts, Uganda. The donations received through the Global Giving website during this quarter have enabled us to continue providing the greatly needed safe clean water, especially as there have been a drought in parts of the district.

Since our last update, we have constructed two additional boreholes. Funds from the Guernsey Overseas Aid & Development Commission were used to complement the donations received through the GlobalGiving website. These additional boreholes have increased the total number of boreholes available to residents in the district.

The impact of these boreholes have been remarkable. The testimony and pictures below tell the story of the benefits of the newly constructed boreholes.

Testimony from a lady about the newly constructed boreholes:

During our routine project monitoring visits, Maria, one of the beneficiary community members, was asked by our project staff to compare the original source of water with the recently completed borehole. Below is what she had to say:

"This pond was the only source of water serving more than thirty families and two schools. Children as young as three years used to collect water from this water source and I think you can see how risky it was, especially for children. In addition, we used to have outbreaks of waterborne diseases in the area. As you can see the water source is located on a slope, so when it rains all the dirt is carried down into the water. This borehole has removed the fear of our children drowning, reduced the time we used to spend on fetching water and, for the past three months, we have had very few cases of unsafe water-related diseases.”

The pond where the community used to collect drinking water

 Community members collecting water from the borehole

GlobalGiving (UK) visits our work in Uganda

Two volunteers from GlobalGiving visited beneficiary communities in our Mityana and Mubende Districts water project area in September 2016. On their return to UK, they gave us a very positive feedback with exciting stories and testimonies of how the project is changing their lives. Most importantly, they had found that contrary to the widely held view of high failure rate of boreholes, all those constructed since 2013 were still in full use and well maintained by the communities. We attribute this to the community empowering approach we use, whereby we support communities to construct the boreholes manually by themselves rather than doing it ourselves for them.