Together We Thrive: Clean Water for Kambama
Located in the Eastern most region of Sierra Leone, the community of Kambama has been described by OneVillage Partners team members as "unique" and "innovative." With a population of 840, most of the residents in this community are farmers, growing and processing products such as rice, palm oil, cassava, and cocoa. Like many villages in Sierra Leone, Kambama is resilient in the face of many challenges: limited access to clean drinking water, women's education and gender equity, and insufficient income.
OneVillage Partners started working with Kambama in September of 2021. As part of the Community Action program, we held a community meeting where everyone was invited to come and vote on the challenges they believed were most important to address as a community. Overwhelmingly, residents voiced their concerns about the lack of available clean water.
According to the 2020 UN Country Annual Results Report, less than 60% of Sierra Leone’s 8 million population do not have access to clean water. Kambama is not exempt from this unfortunate reality. Over 70% of the community's residents have to fetch water from nearby streams, causing water-borne illnesses such as typhoid and cholera. Residents in Kambama report that children often bear the burden of walking miles each day to find water in small streams for their families. Sharing his experience with the community, 9-year-old Lahai explained how he fell ill after drinking a contaminated water fetched from the stream close to their house, forcing him to miss school.
“Today's meeting has helped us realize the seriousness of the effects of water shortage here in our community. This is an opportunity to plan ourselves to solve this major challenge for our own wellbeing.” – Ishmail Brima, traditional authority in Kambama
Once the community decided they needed to focus their efforts on providing accessible, clean water to everyone in the community, 12 men and women volunteer-leaders were trained by OneVillage Partners to plan, manage, and monitor a development project that will solve the community’s problem. What they came up with is innovative, inspiring, and just what Kambama needs: a gravity water system. Using solar energy, the facility will pump water from a nearby reservoir into centrally located tanks, that can be accessed easily and freely by everyone in the community.
Additionally, the volunteer-leaders trained by OneVillage Partners will form and train a Water Management Committee composed of several community members to manage the use of the water system and its ongoing maintenance and repairs, ensuring its future sustainability. They will also go the extra mile and educate local households on good hygiene practices and how to safely store drinking water and prevent water contamination and the spread of diseases.
This is beauty of working with communities to identify their unique assets, as opposed to employing a one-size-fits-all. Where past partner communities have chosen to build or rehabilitate water wells to increase access to clean water, Kambama wanted to take advantage of the nearby reservoir and existing infrastructure.
The Impact: 840 people, including 390 children will have equitable access to a safe, free and sustainable water supply. Together, we can make clean drinking water a reality for Kambama.