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WHAT WE DO

We always begin by delivering clean water. Sometimes we connect villages to the mains water supply but where this is too expensive we provide bore holes or rainwater harvesting equipment. The villagers always provide the unskilled manual labour.


Some women spend up to six hours a day carrying water.  Their skeletons have been compressed under the weight, leaving them in constant pain.
Then we turn to our Ghanaian partners, a charity called ProNet, set up and trained by the British charity WaterAid exactly for this purpose.

ProNet moves into the village for a few weeks and teaches the villagers about health and hygiene. Getting people to change their habits isn't easy, but when it's successful sicknesses like cholera, typhoid, diarrhoea and dysentery plummet, and so does the otherwise astronomical rate of infant mortality.

Then ProNet shows the villagers how to make latrines. They purchase the materials which aren't available locally and help the villagers make about twenty demonstration models. After that it is down to individual families. We provide finance for materials needed for every family to make one latrine (a family unit typically has fifteen to eighteen members) plus communal latrines and washing facilities for schools.

The difference all this makes is enormous. Traditionally, people might have spent four or five hours a day fetching water: now they have that time free to generate income. They go to the valleys less often, bringing them into less contact with mosquitoes, meaning there's less malaria around, and their health improves in all sorts of other ways too.

And at this point it becomes feasible to tackle some of the other water-related diseases which are so prevalent, like worms and conjunctivitis, both of which quickly re-infect where hygiene is poor. We can de-worm whole villages on the same day. And we can bring physiotherapists in to try to free them from some of the muscle pain which results from having carried heavy weights for long hours in the past.

Last but not least, the young men who couldn't find wives because no woman wanted a life of weight lifting and water carrying can finally look forward to having families of their own.

Registered Charity No : 1112415 • t : 44 (0) 207 837 3172 • e : info@ashanti-development.org