What we do - Ashanti Development - Supporting Village Projects in Ghana

What we do

photo of women carrying water

Some women spend up to six hours a day carrying water. Their skeletons have been compressed under the weight, leaving them in constant pain.

We always begin by delivering clean water, whether by drilling boreholes, mending pumps, providing rainwater harvesting or connecting to the mains water supply. We are enormously helped in this by our sponsors, consulting engineers Ove Arup (could we do a link here?) who make their expert knowledge freely available to us.

Then we turn to our Ghanaian partners, a charity called ProNet, set up and trained by the British charity WaterAid.

ProNet spends a few weeks teaching 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 construct latrines. Ashanti Development buys in materials which aren't available locally and ProNet helps the villagers make about twenty demonstration models. After that it is down to individual families. We share the cost of the materials needed for one latrine per family, and provide communal latrines and washing facilities for schools.

The difference all this makes is enormous. Traditionally, women 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, through our help 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.