Water Projects

Water for Great Lakes High School

There have been major problems with the adequacy of the water supply during the recent draught. They had to stop irrigating the coffee and other crops in order to have enough drinking water for the pupils. Hamlet is keen to take advantage of the opportunity of “piggy backing” on some work currently being done by government in the area.

This means that a more reliable source of water can be accessed for less cost than it would usually be. It is necessary to put in 2 kilometres of pipeline including digging trenches, with reservoirs along the way. Total cost will be £3,000 for basic system with just one supply point on site. Ideally it would be good to have separate supply points at dormitories, kitchens, etc which would cost upto an additional £2,000.

The water supply has been a problem since the High School was built, so this is a good opportunity for a longterm solution. One family are selling cookery books to raise money for this and Julia Challender's mother donated her 90th birthday money to the water project.

If you’d like to donate to the water project send a cheque to "volunteeruganda" to Karen Sennett, Trustee 23 Langbourne Avenue, London N6 6AJ.

Nyamirama Community

The most desperate need for water that CHIFCOD faced was in the Nyamirama community. The problem originates from the unique geographical situation as it is a village located in the Rift Valley. Unlike most of Kanugu district which is mountainous and rich in springs and streams, Nyamirama is very flat and therefore without the topographical and geological features that support water retention. The area is sparsely populated compared with neighbouring Kirima. For CHIFCOD, the knowledge that the sparser population allowed greater availability of land was tempered by the context of homes being, as a result, much more widely scattered. This in turn created a problem for access to schools, with many children having to walk up to ten kilometres to reach the closest school.

This problem was compounded by the fact that children were required by their family responsibilities to make several trips a day to a river or stream, sometimes several kilometres from their home, before walking to school. They often arrived late and frequently were already exhausted. Performance in the schools in the area had remained very poor, with most of the children suffering from ill health and attending sporadically. Any attempt by the community to build a clean water system had failed due to the poverty for the people. Diseases caused by drinking contaminated water resulted in greater medical expenses, poorer health and higher mortality.

So it was the CHIFCOD, having initially reached out to Nyamirama to share an educational vision, found itself with little choice but to try and find a solution to the devastating water problem that undermined every aspect of people’s lives.

Hope for a solution came when Hamlet joined the Rotary Club of Bugolobi in 2002. The Rotary Club took up the project and financed a local engineer to carry out a survey and put together an estimate. The Arcadia Club, California, raised funds exceeding 36000 US dollars. The project including protecting a water source two kilometres from Nyamirama Township, the construction of a 20000 litre tank, a pump house and the installation of an engine, the provision of six tap stands, the laying of 2km of pipe and the construction of sanitation facilities. The exhilarated Nyamirama community had never imagined the possibility of such a project coming to fruition. CHIFCOD had transformed the lives of this poverty-stricken community and could now focus on its educational needs.

Kirima Community

At around the same time water problems in Kanugu were intensifying, although for different reasons to those of Nyamirama. While the problems in Nyamirama had to do with the general scarcity of water and lack of funds for viable water systems, for Kirima it was a case of a water system that had been outgrown by a rapidly-expanding population. A system built in 1996 for Kanungu Township at a time where the population was a mere few thousand had expanded into a District. The establishment of Kirima Parents Primary School had been followed in the years after by the opening of several other educational establishments. The outdoor tapstands built under the old water system, and from which the vast majority of the villagers accessed their water, were not only very far from the new institutions but they were also dry most of the time due to the greatly increased demand upon a limited supply.

Once again the community turned in hope and declaration to CHIFCOD for a solution. For the local population of about ten thousand people, this insufficiency of water posed many practical problems. Children had to carry water over long distances, hygiene was poor and the cost of transporting water for agriculture and construction were too high. How could such a project, requiring so great an amount of funding, be taken on by an organization as modest as CHIFCOD?

A solution came in view, as mentioned earlier, through the collaboration of Hamlet with Mr Peter Packham, a financial advisor to CHIFCOD in England. Together they compiled an ambitious project proposal to fund various activities relating to the improvement of health for children and their families in the Kirima community, which the Friends of Kirima, the UK charity that supports CHIFCOD activities, agreed to submit to the Lottery Fund. The application, painstakingly put together, was successful: to the joy of all those involved, a total of £100,000 was approved, a large part of which was to fund a 14km gravity fed water system that still supplies water to at least 15000 people. Users in the community were asked to make modest contributions towards the on-going maintenance of the project but there contributions were affordable because of the water supply being gravity-fed with no pumping costs. For the people of Kanungu, as for those of Nyamirama, their dream of clean, accessible water had, thanks to CHIFCOD, become a reality.