Education Empowers Communities
Around the world, poor households are caught in a vicious cycle of poor health, limited education, and low economic productivity. Improved water and sanitation services are one change that helps people to break out of this poverty trap (Sachs, 2005). In Peru, 3 million people lack access to clean water (water.org). The lack of access to clean water contributes to children getting too sick to attend school on a weekly basis and women are not able to spend more time in continuing education. Education is at the heart of the clean water crisis. It is a both a cause and a result of the crisis. That is why I am passionate about the education work that we do at 33 Buckets.
“Education is at the heart of the clean water crisis. It is both a cause and a result of the crisis.”
At 33 Buckets, our approach has always been focused on human-center design with a big focus in the engineering part. However, water education is also a major pillar in our work and often the most time intensive. Equipping communities with education and training on water systems is the key to providing long-term solutions.
There are two types of education components that we aim to address. One of them is the lack of understanding of the functionality of the water infrastructure system by the JASS members. The JASS is the local water committee comprised of elected community members to oversee the water infrastructure. We have encountered many JASS plumbers who do not understand how the system works and if they don’t know, how are they going to operate it efficiently? One example is the community of Mollemolle.
Mollemolle is a rural community of roughly 250 people that is 29 miles from the center of Cusco to the south. In this community, the local plumber, Claudio, took us to the reservoir where their drip chlorination system had been installed. This system uses buckets in which the water is poured and mixed with either liquid, powder or solid chlorine (in the form of tablets, much like the one used in most pools of homes in Arizona) and it slowly drips into the main reservoir. In this way, the concentration of the chlorine is highly diluted once it reaches the homes.
Claudio told us that the system was no longer working as they had designed it. The system was designed so that the top bucket fills automatically through a pipe when the direct line valve is closed. However, according to him, the pipe had broken and he had to fill up the top bucket manually. And because the maintenance was more complicated than expected, they stopped using the chlorination system altogether. When we got up to the reservoir and we inspected the system, we asked him if he knew how to switched the valves so that water would rise up to the bucket and fill automatically – he had no idea that this is how the system was supposed to work. He just thought or was told that the pipes were broken. We showed him how to turn off the main valve to allow the water to rise to the bucket and he was amazed.
In this community, we did not have to install a brand-new water system. All we had to do is teach them how to use their existing infrastructure and create a training protocol for it so that every JASS members knows how to work the system. In many communities, like Mollemolle, the systems that they have installed, although rudimentary, work well. The problem is that they have little to no education on how the system works. The way to solve this issue is through proper training, which is one of the main pillars of our work at 33 Buckets. We design easy to read manuals in Spanish and soon, Quechua, to empower the local JASS to manage their own systems.
The second education component aims to foster a “Culture of Water”. In 2008, the World Bank Water and Sanitation program did a study of people’s perceptions to water scarcity, water pollution, and climate change that had alarming results in Lima, Peru. According to the study people did not fear the future water situation and in general there was little knowledge regarding water resources or degradation of water systems. The World Bank launched a campaign throughout Peru to tackle what they called the “Culture of Water”. 33 Buckets has experienced the same trend in the villages that we partner with. Most significantly, the community members lack an understanding of what pollutes their water and how they can eliminate that pollution.
We have focused on the education from the bottom up, meaning that we provide hygiene and sanitation education to the children in the communities in hope that it will spread to the elders in the household. We believe that the children can inspire change in their communities.
In Mollemolle, the same community I spoke about earlier, I had an incredible experience with the elementary school children. Last year, we spent a day educating them on water quality. We brought chlorine meters for the newly-formed water quality committee. This was a group of five six grade girls who would oversee the chlorine levels in the school everyday and report to the community’s JASS. It initially would be a training for them only, but the rest of the students in the school were curious about what we were teaching them. The children were eager to learn about where their water came from and what water quality was.
Suddenly, about 15 kids were leading us excitedly to the reservoir. Once we were there, I explained to the kids where their water comes from and how it is treated. They had never heard about this before. It was a learning experience for all of us because I learned more about the impact of water in their daily lives and their relationship with it. I have always known that investing in children is investing in the future, but this experience was an example of how important it is for us to do that. When children are taught the value of water from a young age, they will pass it along to future generations– that is how change is created in the communities.
Education is an important pillar in the solutions to tackle the water crisis around the world. In most communities, the only way to implement truly sustainable solutions is to create a comprehensive plan including water infrastructure and education. This is the goal of 33 Buckets with every one of its community partners. I believe it is the key to building self-reliant communities who will continue to teach future generations how to take care of their water.
Resources
Sachs, Jeffrey. 2005. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin Books.Peru's Water Crisis - Water In Peru 2020. (n.d.). Retrieved September 01, 2020, from https://water.org/our-impact/where-we-work/peru/
World Bank/Peru: Improved Water Resource Management Benefits 3.8 Million. (2017, April 18). Retrieved September 01, 2020, from https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2017/04/28/improved-water-resource-management-benefits-peru