SAFE WATER. SANTIATION. HYGIENE
We empower communities to take charge of their development through community triggering and training households, equipping them with basic skills of securing safe water, proper sanitation and hygiene. Since our inception as a WASH organisation, we have expanded our program to include clean and sustainable energy production and empowerment of the most vulnerable teenage girls and mothers by providing opportunities to access education.
From construction of motorised boreholes, rain water collection tanks, to building simple infrastructure such as tippy taps, we equip communities and families with infrastructure to help them deal with challenges of safe water access. Through training, households are able to build hand-washing facilities and latrines to help improve their sanitation and hygiene around their homes.

SANITATION & HYGIENE

SAFE WATER ACCESS

ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT

THE GIRL+

AWS works with the Sub-County officers, the local Parish leaders and village Local Council (LC1) chair persons, when its team is profiling the WASH status- quo of the households in the different villages. During this time, records of the existing water sources, prevailing household water treatment technologies, existing, functional sanitation facilities, and hygiene practices are observed in each household. A record of any other organisation implementing WASH projects is also taken. The baseline results are uploaded on AWS central Open Data Kit (ODK)data for storage.

Triggering is instant stimulation of a collective sense of disgust and shame, among community members prompting them to take immediate mitigation steps to confront the crude facts about mass Open Defecation (OD) and its negative impact on the entire community. The key point of triggering process is reached when the community arrives at a collective realisation that due to OD, everyone is ingesting each other’s faeces.

After the different homes in the village have experienced transformation, the Water and Sanitation committee representative conducts assessment exercises in search of any sign of human faeces. These community representatives use assessment tools that critically assess each item in the tools and rate the performance so far attained as honestly as possible. This exercise focuses on giving the village a successful external verification and ultimate ODF declaration. Once it is successful and verified externally, the community celebrates the achievement.

AWS organises household representatives found in the transformed villages who are no longer at high risk of suffering from WASH-related sicknesses into small income-generating groups called Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs). These build capital to provide small loans to villagers who want to start Income Generating Activities (IGAs) such as buying goats, cows, and hens or starting a new shop.
AWS trains and draws supportive constitutions for the VSLA and registers the individual groups at the Sub-County, under the Community Development Office. Each VSLA group receives a safe box. Every member gets a small passbook where individual savings keep on record.