WHAT WE DO
SAFE WATER. SANTIATION. HYGIENE
- Get the beneficiaries to accept that they have a problem
- Offer our solutions
- Solar disinfection (SODIS) to make dangerous water safe to drink
- Teaching how to build effective pit latrines (toilet) with no flies or smell, simple hand washing stations (Tippy Taps), private bath shelters, compost pits, drying racks for dishes, energy cook stoves with an exhaust vent among others.
We achieve this through
- Building reinforced concrete specially designed rain water collection tanks
- Securing them with locks
- Mosquito proof
- Easy to clean among others
A borehole is a vertical engineered structure used to access the water from a water table held within the cracks of a rock in the subsoil known as acquifers. The boreholes can be several hundred metres deep. A pump is often installed at the bottom to pump the water up to the surface. 7 motorized borehole systems are fully installed and functional. These include Petta, Kirewa, Okiya, Ragem, Fualwonga and Ndima.
Setup VSLAs run by local committees
- Work with community leaders to promote respect for girls particularly to prevent teenage pregnancy
- Provide scholarships for vulnerable girls including teen mothers
- Provide workshops to promote self esteem in vulnerable girls
- Teach girls how to make reusable menstrual pads
- Build menstrual management rooms in select primary schools

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.