SAFE WATER. SANTIATION. HYGIENE
We exist to eradicate all types of water borne diseases such as diarrhoea, typhoid, dysentery & cholera
Safe water access means everything. That is why we invest in infrastructure that will not only last long but also avail clean water to a big number of people with a low cost of maintenance. Our safe water program harvesting tanks and solar motorised systems to bring water.
The problem
According to the UN, 2.2 billion people around the world still lack safely managed drinking water, while 4.2 billion people worldwide still lacked safely managed sanitation
AWS exists to mitigate the prevalence of Water Sanitation and hygiene related sicknesses using all the available software and hard ware components coupled with declaring communities safe for living through Open Defecation Free.
3 in 10 Households in uganda do not have a toilet
Household ownership of recommendable functional pit latrines and Hand washing especially with detergents are very poor, during the time of baseline with very low rates. An average of about 23% of the households baselined confess having suffered from diarrhoea during the previous one month.
1 in 10 people practice open defecation in uganda
According to a study conducted by UNICEF, latrine and or safe sanitary-ware is still low in rural communities in Uganda. This means that people either share or use bushes as toilets. This faecal matter is washed into water sources that are used by communities which causes diseases.
60% of children live 30 mins walk from water
Majority of households in rural communities walk long hours of up to 60 minutes in search of water for use at home. The most affected group often is children and mothers that are usually responsible for fetching water in homes. The result is that children end up missing school while mothers can hardly get time to take care of their families.
Our Solution
We understand that empowering people fosters desired changes in the communities.
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.
Sanitation & Hygiene
We trigger and train communities in order to help them understand the dangers of poor sanitation and hygiene. Once they have understood, together with the communities we carry out community centred activities to improve their health for a better life altogether.
Safe Water Access
Without access to safe water, all efforts put into sanitation and hygiene can be futile. We provide different approaches to bring clean water and while at it, train communities on ways they can make this water safe for consumption. Water access alone is not enough, it’s safe counts too.
Economic empowerment
Once communities are spending less on medical bills it means families are now able to save some money. We help communities come together and create small saving schemes which not only boost their economic status but also foster sustainability of our program.
The Girl+
We provide vulnerable teenage girls that have conceived with a second chance to life by giving them an opportunity to go back to school and achieve their dreams. Through advocacy and trainings we support the girl child. We equip them with practical skills such as tailoring to help them earn a living
We build lasting solutions to everyday challenges that communities face
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.
Training, triggering and equipping of households
During the follow ups the we carry out household training and equipping. Before that is the triggering process which is used to create disgust among community members to bring awareness the implication of their actions in regard to their own health. The result is simply phenomenal.
We build lasting solutions to everyday challenges that communities face
From building simple infrastructure such as tippy taps for hand washing, user friendly latrines and improving health, we train households and communities on how they can change their lives once and for all.
how we achieve community transformation
We build lasting solutions to everyday challenges that communities face
Through Community Centred Design Approaches, AWS is empowering people to identify the existing Water, Sanitation and Hygiene related challenges, consequently designing the local solutions for these local issues through a community concerted effort.
Community household baselines
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.
community triggering
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.
Follow ups + Training
After triggering, the AWS team re-visits the community to work with the established WASH committees and artisans, to start training people on how to build recommendable Sanitation and Hygiene infrastructure, such as safe latrines, Hand Washing stations, bath shelters, compost pits, drying racks and disinfect water using Solar Disinfection (SODIs). The Community members are also trained in how to build energy-saving cooking stoves using clay mud. These are carefully designed with a vent to exit smoke outside the kitchen.
regular monitoring
This is done based on the guiding of the Key Result Areas (KRA) and established milestones. AWS runs a water quality testing laboratory that helps to keep the quality and treatment technologies for the water to the beneficiaries safe and reliable.
Open Defecation Free (ODF) status celebrations
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.
Economic development
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.
1 https://www.unicef.org/uganda/what-we-do/wash
