Fetching water at Bouré Community tap stand, Togo. Photo: Thomas Christensen POUL DUE JENSEN FOUNDATION WATER The Poul Due Jensen Foundation has decided to not only provide access to clean drinking water for the world’s poorest, but also participate in the debate about what it takes to get there. The autumn of 2020 brought new knowledge about the water consumption in our community water projects which cannot be ignored. In 2017, we asked our NGO partners to prepare for delivery of three key numbers in future water projects financed by the Foundation: Water consumption, community savings, and water quality. It sounds simple, but for instance in our projects in India, all households pay a monthly fee for access and payments are thus not linked to the consumption, and there is no tradition of integrating water metres in the systems. There can also be an issue of retrieving sufficient data from very remote villages for us to study. For these reasons, we still only have data from a few countries and NGOs, but in the autumn of 2020, data from water projects in Kenya, Togo, and Tanzania were studied by Nils Thorup and the Foundation’s intern, Zia Due Jensen. In the communities delivering data, we see a number of very clear tendencies, but the most prominent is very low water consumption: - In most of the communities we looked at, the reported water consumption was between 2 to 5 litres per person per day. According to global health experts, this is too little, as we usually calculate 20 litres per person per day for drinking water, cooking and personal hygiene. If that number Through collecting data from our water projects, we can document that we have not succeeded in helping the communities reach the recommended consumption of 20 litres per person per day. A similar trend can be observed in projects in other countries. is consistently low in most villages, we must be doing something wrong, says Zia Due Jensen, who interned with the Foundation from September to November 2020. Over-dimensioned water systems are in general bad news for financial sustainability of a community water supply, but it could also spoil the water if it spends days in a holding tank under Africa’s sun, allowing bacteria to grow. - We usually design our water systems to deliver 30 litres per person per day, sometimes more. But if the actual consumption is merely 2 to 5 litres, the system is over-dimensioned, explains Nils Thorup, Programme Manager for Water. What is even worse: the expected health benefits from providing access to clean drinking water might not materialise, because of the system’s unexploited capacity. In 2021, the Foundation will increase its attention to understanding the reasons for the low water consumption and find ways to increase it to a level where the planned health benefits of access to clean water are actually delivered. Water use (litres per person per day) 25 20 15 10 5 0 Aug / 16 Mar / 17 Sep / 17 Apr / 18 Oct / 18 May / 19 Average consumption in the Foundation's water projects in Togo Recommended minimum requirements per day Dec / 19 Jun / 20 Jan / 21 21
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