Clean Water & New Skills for Uba Dama

Thank you for your generous donations to the Uba Dama water and sanitation project in rural Ethiopia.  HOPE has raised over £11,000 from your donations via the GlobalGiving website and another £75,000 off line.  These donations come from another end of year online campaign, individual giving, three grants from Trusts, three events to celebrate HOPE UK's 20th year and a supporting church.  HOPE UK is also waiting to hear back from another 20 Foundations further to more grant applications. Unfortunately, the budget of this project reflects a dramatic increase in material costs of at least 38% (in the past 12 months) due to hyper-inflation, increasing our challenge to raise the funds required to deliver this project. 

Along with HOPE Canada, we committed to the Uba Dama community that the project will commence in July 2023 as planned.  It is our desire to see the work start so that this community of 1,812 men, women and children will have access to clean water before the end of the year.  Initially health education and additional agricultural training will start so that the community will be tooled with new knowledge about using healthy behaviours in hygiene and sanitation and new skills for growing vegetables so that increased and varied food might be grown to improve nutrition and food security.  320 women will also start to be taught basic business skills in Self Help Groups (SHGs) at the outset of the project. The building on the actual water system will start after the rainy season has ended, in September-October.  The construction of this water system is expected to take three months, while the health education and SHG training will continue for 18 months, as per the plan developed in conjunction with the local government. This is to allow adequate time for new hygiene and sanitation habits to be embedded and to fully realise the health, educational and economic benefits resulting from having access to clean water. 

In addition, 3,000 fruit trees will be planted to improve the quality and diversity of food intake throughout the community and will also provide another means to increase household income by selling their excess at the market.  Significantly, the trees will also contribute to protecting the environment and their root systems will provide improved erosion control.  This has become increasingly important as heavy and unexpected rains occur out of season.

Thank you again for your contribution to this varied and comprehensive project.  Clean water access is at its core, but it contains four additional components to ensure that the community in Uba Dama becomes self-reliant and can help themselves out of poverty.