Could you help to improve the health of children and communities in Africa?

Wednesday, December 14th, 2016 - By Sara Emanuel, Secretary and Trustee of Water for Kids

In the UK we are extremely fortunate; we take safe drinking water piped to our homes for granted, while people in countries like Uganda and Zambia are not so lucky. Can you imagine having to carry all the water you use from a dirty pond more than 1km away?

The international charity Water for Kids is celebrating 20 years of helping communities in low income countries to access safe drinking water.

The charity was originally started by Environmental Health Officers from the UK after they had worked on a cholera project in Peru. Since 2006, Water for Kids has raised an average of £60,000 every year and has provided water, sanitation and hygiene education to 154 communities in nine countries helping to transform the lives of more than 390,000 people.

Safe water is absolutely essential in order to lead a healthy life and through our efforts, we have improved health and education, reduced poverty and, above all, saved lives. Children have been able to attend school more regularly because there have been fewer cases of disease and safe water supplies mean communities can grow food to eat and sell and can build better homes and new classrooms more easily.

The charity currently focuses its efforts on helping people mainly in Zambia and Uganda. All of the charity’s projects aim to be sustainable, making use of local labour and materials and involving local communities from the outset, so that they are able to maintain installations on their own.

Initiatives carried out in the past 20 years includes:

• building dams and filtering the water, making it easier for people to collect safe water from a pipe
• drilling boreholes and providing hand pumps and stand-pipes
• harvesting rainwater for schools and clinics
• training families to build their own toilets and tippy-taps for hand-washing.

In the coming year, Water for Kids will be completing a range of projects such as conducting a comprehensive water, sanitation and hygiene education project in the village community of Mukuutu in Uganda and providing water, using solar power, to both the school and clinic in Katoba, Zambia.

You can follow Water for Kids on Facebook or receive bimonthly eNewsletters by emailing administrator@waterforkids.org.

You can help people living in low income countries to get easy access to clean, safe and sustainable drinking water long into the future, by making a donation to Water for Kids at this time of goodwill.