https://undark.org/2024/08/13/kenya-clean-water-aerial-piping-system/
"Samuel Onyango’s office at Kibera Primary School is serene and spacious. His
table is neatly arranged, with an assortment of files and an array of books.
One side of his cream-colored office is decked with aggregate performance
scores, and another shows off several trophies in a glass cabinet. Last year,
Onyango’s school performed a traditional dance and scooped third place in the
National Drama and Film Festivals, where schools across the country competed
for the top prize.
But today Onyango, the school’s principal, is bragging about something much
more basic: Thanks to an innovative community program, his students and
teachers are no longer getting sick from dirty water.
Onyango’s school, with a staff of 30 and a student body of about 1,700, is in
Kibera, a neighborhood in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi that is widely known as
Africa’s largest informal settlement. It is a community of houses made from mud
or tin sheeting where residents have to hustle to meet even their most basic
needs, like electricity or clean water.
It is also a community where creativity and innovation, at the heart of any
hustle, are changing how some people can access clean water — and making major
ripples in public health.
Onyango’s school has long gotten its water the same way many people in Kibera
do: by buying it from independent suppliers, who truck water in and sell it for
around $30 per 10,000 liters (about 2,650 gallons). But trucked water can be
contaminated, despite suppliers’ promises, and Onyango’s students and staff
were often using unclean water at home, too. It was common, he says, for both
teachers and students to get sick and miss school because of waterborne
illnesses.
Last November, Onyango’s school got connected to an aerial clean water system
built by a local grassroots organization called SHOFCO, which stands for
Shining Hope for Communities. “Once we got connected to SHOFCO’s water,”
Onyango says, “cases of these ailments reduced to nil.”"
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-puerto-rico-clean-water-innovation/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
