Angelina and her extended family are farmers from the remote and small community, 25 de Junho Socel Communityv, in western Mozambique.
Though there was a water pump in her village, it had been broken for some time and none of the villagers knew how to repair it. Instead, she and her community were forced to collect dirty water from an open spring, 45 minutes’ walk away, before boiling it to make it safe to drink.
WATSAN, our local partners, were happy to make the repairs but their goal is to make water systems for the long term, to build independent, environmentally friendly communities with the means of maintaining and funding their own water supply into the future.
And that’s why they make use of their visits to train villagers in pump maintenance, in hygiene and sanitation. They ensure the water committee leaders are identified and shown how to pool resources in case the water point breaks down again and a locally trained enterprise team is required.
WATSAN photographically document everything they do. They also catalogue all kinds of data; from household and population counts – even the names of household heads who will use the water supply – to the history of water access in that community. They will gather GPS location data, measure pump functionality and efficiency and much more.
And it’s from this data gathered that we show with absolute certainty that we have succeeded in delivering water to a community, that 93% of villages we have visited have a functioning and beneficial water point… and that Angelina is the 500,000th person we have helped.
Village Water is constantly developing its monitoring systems, taking advantage of technology to track impact over time for all our projects.
In 2016 we won the Award for Data from The International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases Water Awards in recognition of our innovative monitoring and evaluation system for data collection, and the commitment to monitoring both WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) and health targets.
