At the Enkusero Sambu Water Project in Kajiado District, Kenya, young women fill jerry cans with precious water. Photo: Dan Tyler/CWS Men clean water troughs for their animals in the center of Oropoi village, Kenya. The single borehole in this settlement is pumping water 24 hours a day. Photo: Bobby Waddell/LWF-ACT

Water for Life: East Africa

Story by Ann Walle/CWS

“The integrated program addresses expanded issues, not only access to water. Water for Life/Water for All actually transforms communities,” enthuses Mary Obiero, CWS program coordinator for Social and Economic Development in East Africa. The program is currently carried out in two countries, Kenya and southern Sudan.

Water for Life targets four objectives:

• multiple solutions and sources
• community ownership and management
• stewardship of the environment
• advocacy

Under this framework, access to water does not mean “just a borehole,” explains Obiero. “We go back to the community and develop other sources” — perhaps roof drainage or rain catchments. These are sustainable. The program acknowledges that, as water is needed to ensure food security, “water is also for peace.”

A community used to have to wait for the government to respond to its particular needs for water, given Kenya’s largely arid and semi-arid geography. Now, some communities can set up their own steering committees, which CWS and its partners help to train in leadership and management, to ensure the success of their work. Partners act as guides. The community pays for the water and for repairs needed to any equipment. They might open shops and teach laborers the skills needed in repairs; this is the next step in building community capacity.

To protect the environment, the groups plant trees, whose root systems protect water supplies.

Finally, through advocacy, communities learn how to lobby local government representatives, to bring programs to their area.

This past year, CWS brought together its East African partners to find ways to expand and enhance this vital work. Senior government officials attended, and ten CWS partners were chosen to work with Kenya’s Minister of Water, using government training materials — exposure that rural communities have never before experienced.

This type of enriching experience encourages communities to register as local organizations and to form steering committees to guide their communities’ development. Currently, eight districts are involved in Kenya: Nakuru, Turkana, West Pokot, Kajiado, Kitui, Mwingi, Tana River, and Narok.

The East Africa advocacy network of Water for All has engaged the United Nations, and will approach UNICEF for water-related assistance for schools, magnifying resources to create sustainable change.

In Sudan, the work has only just begun. A Church World Service team has visited southern Sudan to conduct a baseline survey, and found the region to be “quite needy,” notes Obiero. Following the 2005 peace agreement, more and more displaced people are returning to the region, their number recently surpassed 100,000. “The needs in Sudan are a thousand times greater than in Nairobi,” states Obiero. “These people are suffering more because no one thinks about them. The mortality rate is very high.”

The long-term plan is to create partnerships. Mary Obiero is emphatic that this plan be met. “Now that we are there” in southern Sudan, “we must make it happen.”

Read more in Water: The rest of the story....You and your congregation can support the Water for Life/Water for All program.