POUL DUE JENSEN FOUNDATION WATER The Year of the Pandemic As 2020 progressed, we saw many developing countries enter into lockdown, making it difficult or impossible for our NGO partners to operate in remote communities. Fortunately, we have been able to continue our joint activities in spite of COVID-19. 2020 was a pandemic year, not least when it comes to the Foundation’s water programme. We had to revisit all of our on-going projects. Planning was difficult as nobody knew how much the pandemic would interfere with the NGOs’ ability to access field communities or how long each area would be affected. Simultaneously, we realised that our projects providing drinking water via community tap stands in villages and towns created a critical threat. If an entire village fetches water at the same tap, each tap stand can become an epicentre of disease transmission within the community. To address this threat, we have been working with our Nils Thorup Head of Programme, Water partners to provide hand washing stations and step up hygiene and disease prevention awareness activities in the refugee camps and communities we work in. Additionally, we have provided training and personal protective equipment to health workers in those areas. We have also granted emergency funds for a number of non-partner NGOs to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 more widely. Even if most of our on-going water projects have been delayed because of the pandemic, we have been happy to notice some progress. The joint Water and Research project continues to show promising results, and in the autumn of 2020 we were able to bring a small group of selected Water Mission staff to Denmark for a tailor-made training in tTEM technology allowing the technology to be used in the Foundation’s future water projects. We expect our partners to begin using it in East Africa in 2021, and the lessons learned will hopefully allow us to widen the use of the technology to other projects and locations. Last, but not least, we took the opportunity to explore some of the data generated by the Foundation’s water projects over the last 3-4 years. The exercise has made us question several assumptions, and we have concluded that we need to discuss the issues with our partners so that we continue to improve the way we deliver on our projects in a smarter and more effective way. 9
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