Project Costs include
- plant and equipment expenses for
* Digging wells, rehabilitating springs, creating gravity flow water systems, supplying rainwater tanks (solutions are tailored for each specific village)
* Demonstration family sized toilets; these are a replicable design that will be built mainly with locally available materials. (The type of latrine will depend on the customs of the village regarding bathroom use, cleansing habits and availability of water)
- transportation costs
- community training and socialisation costs for hygiene education and equipment maintenance
- staff and management of the program.
This Footprints funded project to provide clean water and sanitation for 315 people at a cost of A$31.80 each is part of SurfAid’s much larger program in Nias (full details below)
Project Objectives
- To provide clean water to communities affected by preventable diseases caused by a lack of access to clean water supplies
- To reduce child mortality through the improvement of access to water and healthier sanitation practices
- To provide a model for encouraging communities to take responsibility for their own hygiene practices
- To foster community participation and ownership of the project to ensure the long-term maintenance of the facilities.
Project need
Results from a recent SurfAid International survey demonstrate the genuine need for such an initiative as the Community Led Water Security and Total Sanitation Project. In the two areas targeted in this proposal, Afulu and Alasa, diarrhoea rates were 35% and 45% respectively. The Indonesian national average, using the same measurement criteria, is 11%.
Part of a larger project
This project builds on the successful water and sanitation (watsan) project which has already been implemented in Nias, by SurfAid International, that will bring clean water and sanitation to over 2300 households and improve the lives of more than 11,000 individuals.
This Community Based Health Project has stressed the link between hygiene and health (particularly diarrhoea in young children) and has provided training, support and mentoring to partner communities in Nias in an attempt to change current hygiene practices.
Ingestion of unsafe water, inadequate availability of water for hygiene and lack of access to sanitation contribute to about 1·5 million child deaths, and around 88% of deaths from diarrhoea each year worldwide . Improvements in water supply and sanitation in the last 20 years have helped to cut the incidence of diarrhoea. But if these technologies have had an impact on health, it is because they make better hygiene possible .
Information about Nias Archipeligo
The archipelago of Nias is situated off the western coast of North Sumatra. It ranks amongst the poorest areas in Indonesia according to economic indicators and literacy rates. Water provision is a long standing difficulty faced by many villages on the island. Even though rainfall is very high, with over three meters of rain a year and 270 rainy days, there are still many villages and families that suffer from insufficient water supply, water contamination, because of a lack of sound construction knowledge and water sources that are more than one kilometre away.
In these villages, women and children are principally responsible for carrying water for household needs, and in most villages spend more than three hours daily engaged in this task.
In addition to these pre-existing difficulties, an earthquake registering 8.9 on the Richter scale struck Nias on March 28, 2005. Approximately 700 people were killed and many personal and community water supplies were badly damaged or destroyed. The earthquake also had the effect that few people envisioned possible, it raised the reef on the west and south coasts of Nias from one to four meters.
This earthquake had a devastating effect on the water supplies of the villages in those areas. In addition to the collapse of wells (many of which were originally badly designed or built with faulty material), the ground level of many wells rose above the water table. Spring sources that had cement catchments have been badly damaged and some springs have had the water flow greatly reduced. The piping for community gravity and pumped water systems has been damaged. Village water supply reconstruction in many communities is ongoing or complete, however many villages have still received no assistance to improve access to water reduced vulnerability due to poor hygiene practices.
References
1 Robert E Black, Saul S Morris, Jennifer Bryce (2003) Where and why are 10 million children dying every year? The Lancet 2003; 361: 2226–34
2 UNICEF (1999) Towards Better programming - A manual on hygiene promotion, Water, Environment and Sanitation Technical Guidelines Series No. 6
3 KAP (SurfAid’s Knowledge, Attitude and Practice survey, 2007)