POUL DUE JENSEN FOUNDATION WATER 100 pumps for 100 villages: Revisit and upgrade From 2015 – 2018, the Foundation provided access to safe drinking water for 34,000 inhabitants in 101 rural, tribal, underprivileged villages in the states of Odisha (75 villages), and Maharashtra (22 villages), and in the Spiti Valley in the Himalaya (4 villages). We collaborated with our strategic partner, Sunlit Future, and several local NGO’s working in those areas. The Foundation and Sunlit Future delivered the solar driven pump setup, while the local NGO was responsible for ensuring piping, tap stands, and sanitation with funding from other sources. As the work progressed, we discovered that the infrastructure funding arranged by the local NGO’s was not always of the best quality. “The installations in the villages are made in different ways, because Sunlit Future collaborates with different NGO’s in three different regions. The different NGO’s have different approaches to working with the communities: for instance, Gram Vikas demands that all households have a toilet before they bring safe water to the community, but that’s not necessarily the case with the other NGO’s,” explains Nils Thorup, Programme Manager for Water, Poul Due Jensen Foundation. Increased focus on standards In India, the Foundation’s partner, Sunlit Future, cooperates with Tata Trusts, and the Indian authorities, who almost by default finance the sanitation installations in the villages where we bring in access to water. “This setup is a given if we want to operate in India, so we need to design our approach to ensure the quality and sustainability of each project. The situation demands both a hardware and a software approach,” Nils Thorup explains. To improve the sustainability of the system, it is essential that the infrastructure of the water system (borehole, overhead tank, distribution pipelines, valves and taps) are in good shape. “Some of the boreholes are not very well-protected, and we realised that we were not specific enough in dividing the responsibility between the partners, so we are also going back to repair and improve the installations. We need to make standards for the interfaces between the areas of responsibility, so we know exactly where our system ends and theirs begins.” Sunlit Future will work in close association with local NGO’s and ensure that the following steps are taken during the project phase: 1. Borewells or open wells are secured to avoid damage or pollution. 2. S olar panels and overhead tanks are cleaned and well-maintained. 3. Securing that pipelines from borewell to overhead tanks and onwards to the taps are wellmaintained and have no leaks. 4. Securing that each household has a quality tap. Health benefits depend on community Every year, hundreds of people die from diseases caused by inadequate water supply, sanitation, and hygiene. Besides pneumonia, diarrhoea is the main cause of death for children under the age of five in these remote tribal regions. “It is clear that the health situation has improved dramatically. I visited some of the villages in February, and met a father who told me that, before the installation was made, his family visited the health centre at least once every month, but they hadn’t been there at all in the 13 months since they gained access to safe drinking water. But if you had asked them before, they wouldn’t necessarily know that drinking unsafe water caused the diseases,” Nils Thorup says. 20
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