Water Access, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH) Project

June has been an eventful month for Mpoma and GlobeMed at UCLA! The 2016 GROW team arrived in the village Lukojjo (where Johnson Nkosi Primary School is located) on June 13th. After two long plane rides and one 3-hour car ride through Entebbe and Kampala we finally arrived. We were immediately welcomed by the community and have met countless amazing people and made so many new friends. Apart from successfully acclimating into our new surroundings we have accomplished so much!  

Early in our trip we visited the Nama Sub-County headquarters to inform local government officials about our fieldwork surveying households about various sanitation and hygiene criteria in person and via a formal letter. We informed them exactly how we would conduct surveys while maintaining confidentiality, and the number of villages and households we planned to visit. We also wrote up a formal letter informing headquarters that we will be have our Biannual Meeting in a few weeks where we will train water user committees and share the data from our outreaches (fieldwork).

So far we have visited 4 water sources in the villages Waluga, Lukalu, and Buyki. This year we decided to take GIS (Geographic Information System) points at every house we visit so we can accurately measure the distance between the water source and each household. These points will also be helpful for next year so we know if we visited a house the year before! Additionally, we’ve identified two possible villages to implement new WASH programs in that can also serve as controls for our research. We’re almost halfway done with our stay in Uganda but I can’t wait to see what else we will accomplish!