This school has 980 students in the age of 12 – 22 years and 44 teachers. We want to help them with the access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation.
Koas Kralar has a low yearly rainfall and little access to safe drinking water without paying for it. Due to the lack of rainfall there are many large urns and large pits dug into the ground used to store water. Many families still currently drink from the rain urns if they cannot afford to buy water and the ground water is used for many things including cooking and bathing. The Highschool also lacks enough bathrooms to host over 900 students and 12 staff that live on campus.
Through a survey of 33% of the students and all the teachers (held in march 2019) we were shown how much plastic is wasted, school is missed, and how far students must travel to get clean water or if they even have access to clean water. The female population was especially affected because of the lack of sanitation facilities.
We hope to combat all of this through physical intervention with building and approaching it with education to ensure a long-term sustainable project.
2 Dutch foundations support this project and together they tripple all donations.
Content Project
Clean and safe drinking water:
– Community bio-sand-filter
– 2 watertanks (10.000L) + 3 watertanks van (500L) + gutter
– underground piping system + water pump 2.5 Kw
Sanitary facilities:
– 4 toilets
– 2 handwashing-stations
Renovation:
– toilets
– handwashing-facilities
– classrooms
Trash Incenerator
Education:
– ‘WASH-training’ (Water, sanitation and hygiene)
– Carreer day
Goals & Sustainability
We aim to establish an infrastructure that will improve access to safe drinking water, reliable restrooms,waste managment, and improving education around sanitation and hygiene.
Our main goal we would like to achieve is to prevent student absenteeism and to help promote a more comfortable learning environment for all students but especially for female students. Our secondary goals would focus on a cleaner environment, with trash disposal and increasing knowledge of the benefits of proper hygiene and sanitation.
Short term sustainability:
Physically speaking, the community waterfilter has been designed to last up to 50 years with the Bio-sand only needing to be replaced every 10 years. With improved infrastructure to clean water and bathrooms, we hope to see better test scores and a drop in preventable student absences. We are aiming for 70% of students practicing safer techniques by the end of the first year.
Education based approach, we hope to see a shift towards better choices for proper hygiene at the school including, hand washing and trash disposal. We will continue to follow up with the education piece throughout the year and hope to see improved home-life sanitation and hygiene practices.
Long term sustainability:
We would consider this project a success with noticeable increase in female participation at school and a larger population expressing a desire to further their education through post-secondary schooling.
Through a community of practice, we will notice an increase in student involvement towards maintaining this healthier lifestyle not only at school but actively educating family members about safer sanitary practices.