Sand Dams, Climate Change, and Hope

The Hifadhi Africa’s WASH program provides sustainable solutions to water scarcity in arid and semi-arid regions by implementing water and soil conservation innovations that ensure adequate, safe, and accessible water, while rejuvenating and conserving the environment, promoting climate change resilience and boosting household food and nutritional security.

The non-profit has to these far constructed 7 sand dams, installed 4 shallow wells, constructed 6 rock water catchments, and 26 masonry tanks. We have also worked tirelessly with our partner communities to ensure awareness creation, participation and ownership. We have conducted training geared towards communicating donor expectations, project importance, need for community cooperation and ownership and security of project staff and materials. Further, we have conducted capacity-building training for local project committees and farmworkers to maintain, repair and report on the different project components implemented. A major goal of these training is to create local know-how to sustain the access and adoption of improved hygiene and sanitation standards at the community already achieved and enable the community to further develop village action plans on pertinent issues like WASH, environmental health, food security and education.

The purpose of our GlobalGiving campaign, therefore, was to raise funds to continue these critically needed works. FAO anticipates that the half a billion people who live in water-stressed or water scares countries will grow to three billion by 2025.

From the campaign, we raised $110 in May, out of which we received $96.75 as a disbursement. For sand dam construction is a strenuous and physically burdening labor work that involves hundreds of 50KG cement, loads of timber, tons of sand and lava rocks, etc, we could not initiate the work right away with $96.75. Luckily and with gratefulness, we have just received an email from GlobalGiving that the second disbursement of $2,250 is on the way. This is of course much welcome news. The work can now start.

Our interventions have ensured women and girls spend less than 1 hour in search of water, down from 8 hours average the community used before our interventions. This has freed more than 210 hours per person, per month; which the community members can employ in other meaningful social-economic tasks. Our partnership is working and your support is truly transforming lives.