3.4 million people die from water related disease each year – equivalent to the size of the city of Los Angeles. Some of those people live in the district where we work.
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When we began our first Kekeli Village Health Promoter Program in January of 2011 we started the first day of class with a question.
“What do you and your villages need most?”
Their first answer was toilets. Can you imagine? What would be your answer to that question? I know mine certainly wouldn’t be toilets. But that is what these villages need to be healthy…and they know it. From that day forward this theme has come up time and time again when we talk to these villages. One village even went so far as to begin construction only to find out later that we didn’t yet have a plan to assist them to completion of the project.
We are hoping to change that. For the past two years I have been planning to return to Ghana with the sole focus of building our first toilet system in that village that to this day has an unfinished hole in the ground. This trip won’t be an act of charity. At RHC we believe that community-centered projects are the only sustainable solutions and that by utilizing the women we have trained to be community leaders we can create lasting change in these villages. We hope that future toilet projects will be an example of this.
Check out this organization. Their name is Water.org and they do exactly what I just described. Through microloans called “WaterCredit” they work with local partner organizations to develop community-led projects to address WASH-related illness. WASH stands for Water-And-Sanitation-Hygiene. These projects aren’t sexy and don’t generate a lot of interest in the donor world but they are absolutely essential to challenging poverty in rural areas.
Keep on the lookout for future sanitation-related partners and projects from RHC on the horizon! If you have any suggestions or experience in this field, especially in Ghana, please contact us to let us know. We’d love to hear from you!
