Also as part of these holistic programs, 3,022 adults and children received training on effective hand-washing and environmental cleanliness. Three schools formed health clubs, with a membership of 109 students, to facilitate hygiene and sanitation activities among students and community members.

The project also provided Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) in three communities. CLTS is a series of activities around raising awareness of open defecation. The exercise empowers community members to build their own toilets out of locally available materials.

One of the women benefiting from Water.org and APDO’s program is Madam Ama Ataa, a 74-year-old blind woman from Chamba Akuraa, Ghana. Ama talks about the benefits she will get from the new latrines in her community: I have been living in this community for several years with my family. As an old woman who cannot see, it has always been a problem to find a suitable place for defecation. I was so very happy when I heard about some good people coming to support and enable us construct latrines. With the help of my family and some good community members, I have been able to construct my own latrine which I am now proud of. I only have a little work left to complete so that I can finally use it. The one have been using for years is open and not clean at all because the birds go there with us. I can’t just wait for the day when the new latrine will be ready for me to use. I thank you for the support!

The water committee’s activities include organizing weekly maintenance of the system by community members, treatment of the water, and collection of a monthly fee from each household. As treasurer, Maria’s responsibilities include collecting a fee from households each month and keeping track of funds received. The funds collected will be used to pay for operation and maintenance of the community’s water system. This helps ensure that the community will be able to sustain their system for years to come.

Maria’s family was very involved in the construction of the new water system and household latrines. Guatincara’s water project is a gravity flow water system that delivers water from a mountain spring to all the participating homes in the community. The water system includes over nine miles of pipe all laid and buried by hand by the community. Maria’s husband and sons were very involved in this construction, putting in many long, hard days of work. Maria also helped to cook food for the construction teams.

Maria is very grateful for the clean water and new latrine. She said, “Now our entire family is clean and there is enough water. Now we have a new life because the water is treated.” She is glad to have enough water for all her household needs: “Now I use the water to clean the house, to bathe my family, to drink. We are happy because the water is abundant.”

As this region became drier and drier over the years due to climate change, water became more scarce. The community dug an open well about 45 feet deep to ensure consistent access to water. But early last year a young child fell in and drowned. Unable to recover his body, Mai-ba community members had to abandon that water source too.

Just a few months ago, Water.org and its local partner REST completed a new, safe water source in Mai-ba. This spring catchment system and water reservoir allows the villagers to quickly collect water from a tap when they arrive each morning, instead of walking long distances to a contaminated source or waiting on a slow-trickling stream.  We caught a happy moment as one of the young girls from Mai-ba drank from their new water system.

Today, things are different for the people of Biherawi village because of Water.org and its local partner REST.

Yehansu Marye, age 35, and Hiwot Taddess, age 27, both live in Biherawi village and are members of the water and sanitation committee representing women of their village. This committee is in charge of the hand-dug well, constructed through the joint effort of the community, Water.org, and REST.

Yehansu and Hiwot used to travel for more than an hour each day to collect water from a contaminated river. The amount of water they collected was very limited and was not always enough to provide the minimum amount needed for their families’ daily living needs. But the distance was too far to make multiple trips.

“Because this amount of water was not enough to use for drinking and cooking, I had to use it very economically. On top of that, the water was unclean and was unpleasant to see it with the naked eye,” Hiwot said.

Today, the struggle for enough of water is solved. Women like Yehansu and Hiwot are able to easily obtain and use enough water each day. In addition to the three-fold increase in the amount of available water, the distance to fetch water also has decreased from one hour to 5 to 10 minutes.

The availability of clean and safe water in the village has allowed the community to use water for personal hygiene and environmental sanitation as well.

According to Yehansu and Hiwot, construction of the community’s hand-dug well has enabled their children to go to school in a timely manner. Because their children often used to help collect water, they were not able to attend school on time, usually missing two classes every day. But now, thanks to the new well, this is no longer the case.

Water.org and REST have also provided training sessions on the use and management of water for the members of this rural community. Yehansu and Hiwot were among the participants of these trainings. They took a four-day water and sanitation session where they learned how to property maintain the well and ensure its long-term viability. Other topics included in the training were sanitation, maintenance, proper uses of water, and well-guarding.

Yehansu is now in charge of fee collection and Hiwot is in charge of sanitation for the hand-dug well. Hiwot teaches women how to use water effectively and safely, from collection to consumption, as well as how to properly use the constructed pit latrine and keep it clean. The community has also agreed to contribute one Birr/month ($0.07 USD) per household for costs such as maintenance and protection.

Water.org and one of its local partners, COCEPRADIL, worked with the community of Cholunquez to help them obtain much-needed access to safe water and sanitation. The water access component was accomplished through a gravity-fed system, with individual households connected directly off of the main pipeline. Community members helped build the system by digging trenches for pipes, laying the pipes, and building the individual “pila”, or sink, for their own household.

To achieve the sanitation component of the project, Water.org and COCEPRADIL provided training sessions for families about how to improve the sanitation situation in their household. These sessions covered topics such as burying trash, hand washing, the safe handling of water, and keeping chickens and livestock out of the house – usually by building fences around the houses.

Twelve-year-old Isidoro Alvarado shares what life is like with the new, clean water point in her home:

How do you feel now that you have water in your home?
We feel happy because the thing we need the most is water. Everyone worked together to complete the project and now that we have water, already it is a different environment. We are content and grateful.

What is the sanitation situation today in your house and community?
Today we see a different environment. Before, each family lived with the dogs, chickens and pigs. Now we have separated them and everything looks better. Our houses are well-enclosed from the outside and well-swept. We have homes that are neat.

How is the project being maintained?
Right now it is functioning very well. If there is any damage, all the communities will work together to support the work to fix it.

Twenty-two year old Moina now lives in Board Guard slum with her husband and eight-month-old daughter. She works as a housemaid and her husband is a rickshaw puller. Here, they pay 500 taka ($7.25 USD) per month for rent.

Because her slum does not have access to safe water, she currently gets her family’s drinking water from a public source about a mile away. They must pay 100 taka ($1.45 USD) per month to use it. It’s not unusual for the water to run out before everyone in line has been able to fill their pots. She collects water in the morning and again in the evening. Each trip takes her one to two hours.

She uses the nearby pond for all other daily water needs – bathing, washing clothing, cleaning utensils, etc. This pond is contaminated by human and animal waste, as well as pollution. There are no sanitary toilets in Board Guard; instead, they have constructed “hanging latrines,” which are basically sheets of cloth hung on bamboo poles for privacy, and then more bamboo poles to stand on while defecating into the water (or onto the ground) only two feet below.

Moina and her family have suffered from water-related disease, such as diarrhea, jaundice, and various skin diseases. Moina is a young woman with tremendous energy and spirit. She is working with other Board Guard residents and they have formed community-based organization to apply for a small loan for a tubewell and latrine through DSK, Water.org’s local partner.

Moina said it is her dream to have clean water right by her home.

Water.org has a long history of innovation, social entrepreneurship, and being a champion for sector change. This month, we are announcing our latest initiative, the Giving Network, an open source platform that will connect online communities with our work in the field.

By integrating content from the web, flickr, Google Maps, and field partners while making it easier than ever to share content on popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Water.org aims to redefine the notion of transparency and nonprofit development work.

The system is currently in public beta testing and includes example content from our field work in Tigray, Ethiopia. This site can be accessed at our.Water.org. Watch a quick screen-cast demonstration of our.Water.org below or go login to the site at http://our.Water.org.

As user testing continues through the summer, Water.org will be working to refine field reporting techniques and processes. The Giving Network will ultimately be released as an open source project enabling the entire nonprofit community to benefit from the initiative. The full press release can be found here.

Extended Q&A

Is the Giving Network just another online social network?

No. One of the reasons we chose to name this initiative the “giving” network is because it is not a “social” network. Our thinking was people don’t really want another social network, they want to use the ones they’ve already embraced. The Giving Network makes it easy for someone to login using their Facebook or Twitter account, pick a few villages to follow, and come back when they’d like to share content out of the site. In fact, we designed the Giving Network for this type of use so if there’s activity set for your villages this coming week we send you an email to keep you updated.  Of course, this customized e-mail includes quick links back to the site so you can share what’s going on with others via Facebook and Twitter.

While there’s lots of clever online initiatives in the nonprofit sector, we believe there is a great deal of green space in using technology to connect supporters directly with beneficiaries. We feel these  types of connections are what people crave.  This is our first effort to chart out this green space.  

Why does our.Water.org only include a few villages and not all of Water.org’s project work?

We wanted to launch our beta on a small scale first in order to collect user feedback on the concept. The project that is featured in the beta is from our work in Tigray, Ethiopia and includes a variety of water and sanitation projects being completed in 26 different villages. As we move through our beta, we will begin to add more and more projects, with the ultimate goal of allowing visitors to follow every project in our system.

What does it mean that the Giving Network is an open source initiative and why does that matter?

Generally speaking, there are two ways to license the underlying code and technology that is included in software and websites. Normally, an open source licensed initiative means that the underlying code for the project can be freely reviewed, modified, and used by other organizations. There are still often conditions of reuse, but this is in sharp contrast to a closed source initiative where only the developer of a codebase can benefit from it’s development.

So while our mission is to help people living in the developing world gain access to safe water and sanitation, ultimately this translates to our work helping others. We asked ourselves, “how could a project like the Giving Network be exempt from that notion?” We also believe nearly any nonprofit that wants to report progress on field-based work to other stakeholders, donors and management can benefit from what we are building.

The terms of our licensing and our precise timing of release have yet to be determined . If you are a nonprofit and are interested in partnering with Water.org in this effort, please email beta@water.org.

How often will your co-founders Matt Damon and Gary White make appearances in The Giving Network?

Probably never. The primary purpose of this work is NOT to connect supporters to other supporters, but rather to directly engage supporters with real work in the field and then ultimately with beneficiaries.

Non-profits like Water.org work toward sector change and are intimately involved in researching, defining, piloting, funding, scaling, delivering, and monitoring proven and new solutions to an issue – in our case, the issue is access to water and sanitation. The Giving Network allows us and our supporters to more efficiently share this story. For newer supporters, we believe it will help them to better understand our cause, what’s involved in creating change, and how they can help.  

Who do you anticipate will be the primary stakeholders?  

The short answer: supporters and donors.  But we’d like expand the notion of a donor here as well.  There are so many great causes out there and we believe it’s important to give people a low barrier to entry in “donating” to a cause. We’ve been building tools (like this one) that allow people to “donate their voice.”  Another good example of this thinking is at RT.Water.org where we allow people to “donate their Twitter status” and every so often we tweet something on behalf of our donors.  

For many of us, pausing to stop, notice, and learn more is a big investment. We deliberately decided to go with a “no charge for admission” to this tool – you can be a casual lurker who never donates and still see what’s going on. To that end, we even designed a public page system for projects and users as well.

Beyond Twitter and Facebook integration, will The Giving Network have any unique social networking features to differentiate it?

Just for summary:

(1) It’s an open source project. Once we finish our beta we plan to release it for other nonprofits to use for their own work. We’re not aware of any large nonprofits that currently allow supporters follow field work in real-time. Transparency is the currency of trust.  The Giving Nework will help nonprofits increase their trust currency via a tool built in the open.

(2) We support Facebook and Twitter APIs (Connect and OAuth respectively).  We are not just including a quick link button, but have integrated at the API level. This gives us several nice friend invite features and a simplified sign-on process while giving us a good deal more headroom for planned features. The goal with supporting these APIs is to decrease the friction of getting news from our site to someone’s personal online network.

(3) Timely reporting.  This first beta is loaded with sample data.  We are on track to re-launch with live reporting from our work later this year.

(4) Public and XML access to content.  If you visit http://our.water.org/project/mia-gunado you will see the same content you get from XML feed http://our.water.org/project/feeds/story-region-updates/mai-alekti/4/.  Both are publicly accessible pages just like you can do for individual users as well. We intend to build on these concepts to give developers simplified access to content hosted in a site.

(5) Open Integration.  While still in its infancy, we are already looking into how we integrate and deploy content from mobile and other sources in the future.

Your press release says “bottom line” business management.  What does that mean?

Over time, we plan to use the Giving Network to supplement our internal reporting and project management activities. By improving organizational efficiencies we can make every gift have the greatest impact. We are already exploring other ways we can automate collection and repurpose the content hosted in the Giving Network.

Friday morning was rainy and gray as we started the bumpy, and now muddy, journey back to the capitol city. As we approached the outskirts of the city, we passed by gorgeous beaches and a few really nice houses. Then we came to the part of the ride I was dreading- the bright blue tents on the dry, rocky mountains outside of the city. These tents are the new homes of people from Port au Prince with no place to go. On the flight back to the US, I sat next to a Danish journalist who told me that a few weeks ago, the people in this remote, dry camp didn’t have waterproof shelter, food, or water. Now at least they have a few NGOs checking in on them.

After the camp we came to a large area of land the US military has taken over with signature camouflage equipment everywhere. We passed the airport and then…back to the nightmare of dense destruction in Port au Prince. It was raining that day and life in the tent camps must have been miserable. I had made reservations at a hotel near Champs de Mars- the area downtown with many government buildings and what used to be pretty parks, now compounds containing hundreds of tents. Supposedly CNN reported from the hotel in the weeks after the quake and I can see why- it is in the middle of what is the new Port au Prince. The main road to the hotel was blocked for food distribution by the US military. Luckily the soldiers and I didn’t have any language barriers so I could get an alternate route. The hotel was a surreal mix of journalists and medical teams mixing together in the hotel bar and pool area. Although I wanted to stay outside for fear of aftershocks, the hotel construction looked fairly stable and I was thankful for a roof over my head, as hundreds of people across the street did not have that luxury.

Tomorrow we head back home.

March 20, 2010 – Back to the US

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to travel for my work with Water.org and sometimes even luckier that I can come home to Kansas City, back to my office and home. The man who took Mostafa and me to the Port au Prince airport to go back to the U.S. was very friendly and told us about his daughter who did not make it through the earthquake. I took the picture he offered me and saw her smiling face, beautiful and young. Tears welled up in my eyes and I admired our driver for remembering his daughter and carrying on with his life.
This trip to Haiti reminded me that the work that Water.org was doing in Haiti pre-earthquake is maybe even more important now. However, many challenges remain for executing sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene projects with so much (necessary) emergency aid coming into the country.

- April Davies, Water.org International Program Manager

April’s Day One in Haiti
April’s Day Two in Haiti
April’s Day Three & Four in Haiti

A tent city outside of Port au Prince that sprung up after the earthquake on January 12.

March 17, 2010

The Water.org team traveled from Port au Prince to Gonaives, Haiti, to visit past water projects of a potential partner organization. This organization constructs rainwater cisterns with peasant associations in rural areas of the country.

Gonaives is the capitol of Artibonite Region. The city was severely damaged by tropical storms and hurricanes in 2004, and then again in 2008. The destruction is still visible on nearly every street in the city. Since January 12, tens of thousands of people have migrated to Gonaives from Port au Prince to start over or stay with family. Even more people have migrated from Port au Prince to their rural homes in the countryside surrounding the city.

Although Gonaives is only 68 miles from Port au Prince, it took us around four hours to reach the city. The area around Gonaives has a lot of white dust that coats buildings, vehicles, and people when it’s dry outside.

We arrived at the hotel in time to meet staff from the potential partner organization, eat a late lunch/early dinner of fried chicken and plantains, and meet with Haiti Outreach’s Country Director who was there with colleagues to install a pump on an irrigation system outside of town. The next day we woke up early and traveled an hour outside of town with our potential partner to begin talking to peasant’s associations and households about the rainwater harvesting cisterns.

Water.org certifies partner organizations based on whether the organization shares our core views of the factors that make water, sanitation and hygiene projects successful and sustainable. The certification process is rigorous and takes a fair amount of time and energy on the part of Water.org and the potential partner organization. We look at organizational documents and conduct interviews of the staff and communities benefitting from past projects the organization. Mostafa and I were in Artibonite to interview water committees and households benefitting from cistern projects.

One of my favorite parts of my job is meeting with community members and discussing water, sanitation and hygiene. We met with three water committees in three different communities in Artibonite, all outside under the trees with views of amazing mountains. We also visited and interviewed households benefitting from the cisterns.

A community meeting in the Artibonite region.

We spent nearly 10 hours learning about the communities and the cistern project. It was a good day filled with handshakes, learning, questions, visits, and fresh air. As we drove back to Gonaives in the dark on a bumpy road in the middle of the countryside I felt satisfied with the work we accomplished. However, my contentedness turned to sadness at dinner that evening when our driver announced that it had rained hard in Port au Prince that evening. He and his family lost their home in the earthquake and the rain was a troubling sign of the season to come. We sat in silence, trying to eat and imaging the thousands of people wet and suffering in Port au Prince, where we were heading back to the next day.

- April Davies, Water.org International Program Manager

April’s Day One in Haiti
April’s Day Two in Haiti
April’s Last Days in Haiti – Back to the US

I was up before 6 a.m. Our plan was to travel to the community of Leogane (the epicenter of the earthquake) early in order to beat the traffic in Petionville and Carrefour. As we drove down Delmas (a main street in Port au Prince), I looked at the buildings that had I imagined so many times since the earthquake – the buildings I had seen time and time again, shuttling between the airport, hotels, and meetings in Port au Prince. Some were completely destroyed, pan-caked to the ground, yet others only had cracks.

In our first 20 minutes we ran into a line of hundreds of women that stretched for blocks down the street. Soon we saw the US military personnel, signaling that this was a food distribution line for women only. Farther down the block, women were leaving with large bags of rice on their heads.

The further west we traveled from Port au Prince, the heavier the traffic and the worse the destruction. In Carrefour we began to see tent communities (and more permanent small shelters) by the side of the road and in the median. By the time we arrived in Leogane, almost every single structure we passed was damaged or destroyed.

Our first stops in Leogane were community wells that the Haiti Outreach team had rehabilitated post-earthquake for free for the government. Both of the wells were in urban areas of Leogane and many people were in line to collect water. A fight broke out at one of the wells between a young man and woman. Someone had moved the other person’s bucket out of line; shoving and punching followed.

After seeing the repaired wells, we visited a rural community that did not have access to water. It appeared as though the community was dispersed pre-earthquake and had come together to live in bed-sheet structures after January 12. They showed us a well with a broken pump, which had been broken for some time before the earthquake. The people said they would like for us to assist in repairing the well or creating a whole new water source the community could access.

One of the reasons Water.org decided to partner with Haiti Outreach is the organization’s strong commitment to projects that are demand-driven, managed by the community, and financially sustainable. Roge spoke with the community members upon hearing their request for water and described the steps the community would have to take in order to obtain their own water source. They will write a letter asking for assistance, conduct a community census, save a small amount of money to begin a community savings account, provide locally available materials and labor for construction, and be willing to organize a committee to oversee the project. The community members said they would complete these steps for water. Roge took photos of the community and recorded the names and phone numbers of the community leaders to follow up. I hope they can work together in the future for safe water.

Later in the day, we went with the Haiti Outreach staff to meet the German national emergency response team. We went to obtain water source quality data that they had collected over the past weeks. In the camp, the Germans had a full laboratory set up to test water. This made Dave and Roge very happy as they are trying to begin in-house water quality testing in their offices in Pignon.

We then traveled out of Leogane to the coastal town of Miragoane to drop Dave off to catch a boat to La Gonave, where Haiti Outreach was hosting a team from Engineers without Borders for the week. The drive was beautiful- green mountains and majestic views. The highway was damaged from the earthquake and past storms that had created lakes and detours. We left Dave and began the trek back to Port au Prince. Roge bought mangoes on the side of the road to eat and Mostafa and I napped as we approached the capitol city. We arrived in Port au Prince after dark and after curfew. Roge suddenly pulled the pick-up to the side of the road – we had a flat tire! Luckily, Roge and Mostafa changed the tire and no one bothered us. We arrived home very tired and dusty at around 9:30 p.m., thinking of the long day’s images and events. I was ready to sleep.

Tomorrow we are going to Gonaives to complete the certification of a new partner organization.

- April Davies, Water.org International Program Manager

April’s Day One in Haiti
April’s Day Three & Four in Haiti
April’s Last Days in Haiti – Back to the US