charity : water

Here's a good NY Times article (short, succinct, Nicholas Kristof) about one of the donors for a project I'm working on, charity : water. To be honest I had never heard of them before this internship and didn't know much about them until I read this article...

charity : water is currently funding us to build/rehabilitate 35 village water pumps and 35 wells and elevated water towers in health centers. This is part of a larger health systems rebuilding project. The cool thing that my organization does is 1) when building pumps they use a rope pump technology developed in Ghana and make it w/ local materials, and 2) they form water and sanitation teams in all the villages. The team is trained to do normal pump maintenance and repair (along w/ hygiene promotion). This helps avoid a very common problem with water projects, which is that NGOs often install nice pumps that no one can repair because they either lack the knowledge or materials. The countryside of Africa is strewn w/ defunct pumps...