WASH FOR DEVELOPMENT VIA NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIPS – Water Charity – The Gambia

Water For Everyone, Water For Everyone - The Gambia

WASH FOR DEVELOPMENT VIA NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIPS – Water Charity – The Gambia

GambiaRising, Trees for the Future, and WASH for development

We believe liberating women and girls from the duty of fetching water is the key to real development. It frees up women’s time for income production and girls’ time for school. In our Sustainability and Development Plan & Fulabantang Ward Pilot Project, we partnered with two nonprofits. GambiaRising had financed the community building of five schools in the Fulabantang Ward and provides numerous scholarships and school-related services in the area. With Water Charity as a motivated partner, Trees for the Future launched a 4-year forest-garden project in the Ward, training more than 300 forest gardeners and furnishing them with nurseries, tools, and training. We recruited from the GambiaRising-affiliated schools’ mothers’ clubs to organize the women smallholding farmers, as well as to lobby for and enable education, particularly for the girls who would otherwise be made to tend to the household’s water fetching duties.

Trees for the Future provides all that it takes to farm smallholding forest gardens to assist in family smallholder-centric and female-centric income generation. By steering a portion of the resulting additional income toward a water maintenance fund, we seek to move from water-based relief to development. When farmers implement the Forest Garden Approach, their families have a diverse array of foods growing year-round. The improved quantity and quality of foods available lead to ending hunger and improving the nutritional status of families in a sustainable way.

*32 rehabilitated waterpoints (including a few boreholes) in 24 villages in Fulabantang Ward*

In September, 2019, Trees for the Future, Gambia Rising, and Water Charity started the first of its kind program in The Gambia: training 22 of the Fulabantang Ward’s most talented gardeners to be forest garden trainers. GambiaRising financed the community building of several schools, two in the Fulabantang Ward, where our Trees for the Future Forest Garden project is now based. We made sure that women were well represented in the group of Fulabantang Ward Forest Garden Trainers.

If our Fulabantang Ward Sustainability and Development Pilot Project works, and with the help of Gambia Rising, we hope the water systems will be maintained so that girls can continue to go to school and women and other smallholder farmers can continue to increase their incomes and contribute to the water system’s long-term maintenance fund. Meanwhile, we have fixed 32 water points in 24 villages in the Central River Region’s Fulabantang Ward to water those forest gardens over the next four years of our Trees for the Future forest garden program.

Training 22 of the Fula Bantang Ward’s most talented gardeners to be forest garden trainers.

Our model adds to Water Access the components of Education and Income/Nutrition through partnerships with other NGOs.

Return to Water Charity – The Gambia landing page.

PLEASE VISIT OUR OTHER PROGRAM PAGES:

WATER ACCESS FOR WATER-CHALLENGED GAMBIANS

THE GAMBIA WASH CAPACITY AND GIS MAPPING

COVID-19 HAND-WASHING STATIONS IN THE GAMBIA

There is still a great deal of need for water access in rural The Gambia, so PLEASE DONATE TODAY USING THE BUTTON BELOW.

THE GAMBIA WASH CAPACITY AND GIS MAPPING

Water For Everyone, Water For Everyone - The Gambia

THE GAMBIA WASH CAPACITY AND GIS MAPPING

WASH GIS MAPPING

In each country covered by our Water for Everyone initiative, we recruited local WASH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene)–related workers, trained them, outfitted them with GPS-enabled smart tablets loaded with our GIS water survey and a list of the villages, fuel for their government motorbikes, and a per diem. The surveyors took pictures and answered a series of questions about each public waterpoint in each village. In The Gambia, between December 2018 and October 2019, Water Charity surveyed a total of 1,690 communities and 1,511,232 people. Each surveyor is located in his or her region, so we continue to correspond about the status of water systems in their regions as a means of updating the map.

We are working to make our GIS water system user-friendly and accessible to different stakeholders with varying levels of access and authority. The web-based platform tracks the achievement of performance indicators and targets. This allows stakeholders to prioritize the most water-challenged Gambian communities. As we survey the country, we reach out to other sections of the national WASH Community. We apprise them of our mapping efforts, we show them our initial results, and we encourage them to share whatever data they may have regarding their in-country WASH interventions so that we may include their interventions on the map.

National WASH Capacity, Collaboration, and Development

We work to do this in collaboration with donors and the in-country WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) community. We believe water projects are only sustained when the in-country WASH capacity is there to maintain them, and we have trained more than 150 WASH professionals in the use of tablets, in GIS surveying methods, in the use and distribution of filters, and on water testing methods. Because Water Charity not only surveys and maps but also develops and completes water projects, we found that WASH project planning benefitted greatly from mapping: not only with regard to using the map results, but also because of how the mapping effort itself enriches, deepens, and updates the knowledge of embedded regional staff.

Outside of the collaborative and national benefits of GIS mapping, as an organization we developed a list of survey questions with the depth and breadth to allow us to: 1.) Triage water-challenged communities; 2.) Understand the broad scope of the work at each waterpoint; and 3.) Leave open the ability for wider development strategies over time.

There is still a great deal of need for water access in rural The Gambia, so please donate to our cause today.

Return to Water Charity – The Gambia landing page.

VISIT OUR PROGRAM PAGES:

WATER ACCESS FOR WATER-CHALLENGED GAMBIANS

COVID-19 HAND-WASHING STATIONS IN THE GAMBIA

WASH FOR DEVELOPMENT VIA NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIPS

There is still great need for water access in rural The Gambia. So PLEASE DONATE TODAY USING THE BUTTON BELOW.

WATER ACCESS FOR MOST WATER-CHALLENGED GAMBIANS

Water For Everyone, Water For Everyone - The Gambia

WATER ACCESS FOR MOST WATER-CHALLENGED GAMBIANS

Fixing Broken Wells In the Most Water Challenged Communities

Uneven distribution of fresh sources and constraints in water resources development and management make water access difficult for many segments of the Gambian population, especially those in the rural areas who often rely on unsafe water sources. In our GIS Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) mapping survey, we found more than 60 percent of The Gambia’s rural waterpoints were in disrepair. So far, we have completed 72 separate water rehabilitation projects, including 32 in the Fulabantang Ward, where our Sustainability and Development Plan & Pilot Project is based. Check out our Sustainability and Development plan.

32 well rehabilitation projects (including several boreholes) in 24 villages in the Fulabantang Ward

Now over 72 water rehabilitation projects in the the most water-challenged areas in The Gambia, as determined by our GIS waterpoint mapping and survey.

Check out a few of our projects below. There is still a great deal of need for water access in rural The Gambia, so please donate to our cause today.

Return to Water Charity – The Gambia landing page.

Please visit our Project Pages to see the work we are doing on the ground:

THE GAMBIA WASH CAPACITY AND GIS MAPPING

COVID-19 HAND-WASHING STATIONS IN THE GAMBIA

WASH FOR DEVELOPMENT VIA NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIPS

Check out our ESRI GIS Storymap:

There is great need for water access in rural The Gambia, so please use the button below to donate to our cause today.

Water For Everyone – The Gambia

Water For Everyone, Water For Everyone - The Gambia

Water For Everyone – The Gambia

The “Water for Everyone” initiative uses GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping as a collaborative umbrella facilitating the division of work between all parties interested in SDG 6’s provision of clean water for all. In the case of Water Charity’s Water for Everyone Initiative, provision of clean water to all the 15 million people who live in The Gambia, Togo, and Liberia—for starters. The most recent initiative undertaken by our Gambia Water Charity team included providing COVID-19 combatting hand-washing stations and soap at every well Water Charity rehabilitates in The Gambia.

Water for Everyone is a campaign to provide water for everyone in a border-to-border strategy using Geographic Information System (GIS) map-based collaboration.

The Gambia is the smallest country in mainland Africa and one of the poorest in the world. Lack of infrastructure, particularly the lack of efficient water management systems, is largely responsible for the low productivity of smallholder farms and therefore for The Gambia’s widespread rural poverty.

When asked how he started the herculean task of penning the Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein reportedly said, “I wisely started with a map.”

Check out our Geographic Information System (GIS) Storymap below.

From each of The Gambia’s five regions, we recruited and trained surveyors. For several months, our surveyors rode motorbikes to visit and diagnose every public well on the GPS-enabled smart tablets in 2,059 communities, water services for a total of 2,008,019 people

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Can you imagine not having water during the Coronavirus Pandemic?

With no formal system to provide rural water, let alone maintain the water systems, over 60 percent of The Gambia’s rural wells are broken. And, after taking our survey, we know what communities need intervention the most.

At every well we rehabilitate, we are installing hand-washing stations with soap to combat the transmission of the Coronavirus. Help Gambians protect themselves from the Cornoavirus by helping to provide water.

Because, as Kofi Annan said, “Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and therefore a basic human right.

**Sustainable Development Goal 6.1**: **Safe and affordable drinking water**
United Nations definition: “By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to ***safe and affordable drinking water for all***.“

Fixing Broken Wells In the Most Water Challenged Communities

Uneven distribution of fresh sources and constraints in water resources development and management make water access difficult for many segments of the Gambian population, especially those in the rural areas who often rely on unsafe water sources. In our GIS Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) mapping survey, we found more than 60 percent of The Gambia’s rural waterpoints were in disrepair. So far, we have completed 72 separate water rehabilitation projects, including 32 in the Fulabantang Ward, where our Sustainability and Development Plan & Pilot Project is based.

Please visit our Project Pages to see the work we are doing on the ground:

WATER ACCESS FOR WATER-CHALLENGED GAMBIANS

THE GAMBIA WASH CAPACITY AND GIS MAPPING

COVID-19 HAND-WASHING STATIONS IN THE GAMBIA

WASH FOR DEVELOPMENT VIA NONPROFIT PARTNERSHIPS

Check Out Our GIS Storymap:

There is a great need for water access in rural The Gambia, so please donate to our cause today.