I’ve spent a good deal of time with babies and toddlers recently and so once again come into contact with two of the key practical aspects of child care – what goes in at one end and what comes out at the other. We think quite a lot about the first of these, at harvest festival and when we collect for the food bank, but the second is not such an attractive topic. However, sanitation is crucial for all communities.
While I was looking after two of the grandchildren recently their mother was in Kenya and taking the opportunity, alongside other delegates to the Water, Engineering and Development Centre conference, to see what Practical Action, one of the charities supported by Hampstead Parish Church, had done to support a community total sanitation project in Rhonda, a low-income settlement in Nakuru, Kenya. The project – you can read more about it in her July 17 contribution to the Practical Action blog on their website – involves 140 local volunteers, each responsible for a group of about 500 people. The idea is for whole areas to become completely cleaned up with adequate well-used sanitation for all, and proper places to wash hands. The project facilitators have helped local landlords to get cheap loans for installing sanitation facilities, come up with local designs for them that fit the varied local circumstances, and helped local people to find appropriate ways of sewage disposal. All this has necessarily involved many stakeholders in the local community – landlords, tenants, the local administration, elders, chiefs and churches, and all the schools too. So the aim really is community-led total sanitation, and the area is steadily moving towards achieving this.
This is only one example of the type of community-led, practical, unglamorous but essential projects that Practical Action specialises in facilitating. You may have heard Charlotte Green talking for the Radio 4 appeal about a very different but equally practical one supporting waste-pickers in Nepal. Moreover, the lessons learnt (in Nakuru they relate to a very challenging urban area – the challenges include absentee landlords and a mobile population) can be analysed and some of the conclusions applied, in suitably modified form, to other areas and countries.
An outside view of the Nakuru initiative is at
http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/blog/sanitation-nakuru-s-low-income-urban-areas.
Our financial contribution helps to provide the know-how and the local support for practical, sometimes low-key, often unglamorous but crucial ways of enabling people everywhere to access the basic means to a healthy life that we in privileged Hampstead take for granted.
Our charities – Practical Action
Anne Stevens