Engineers Without Borders - Improving Well-Being With Technology

Challenge

Clean Water – All day, Everyday!

Do you agree that everyone deserves clean and safe drinking water?

If so, we ask your help to make this possible for the people in Oku, in the Northwest of Cameroon!

#Water4Oku

Oku is a region in the Northwest of Cameroon with dry and rainy seasons, with mountains and forest, where the main economic activity is agriculture.

Camaay, the Cameroon Association of Active Youths, has contacted Engineers Without Borders Netherlands for engineering help on solving the water problems in the region. The region has been offered water systems in the 80s but the locals are not trained on how to maintain them. In many villages, the population outgrew the capacity of the installed systems.

Here, people still get severely ill from consuming unsafe water. This happens more often in the dry season, when water becomes scarce. Death as a result of drinking unsafe water is not uncommon. The water supply system in place is rundown and outdated.

Often, drinking water is collected directly from surface water and the odds of contamination are high. The current infrastructure is not maintained due to lack of knowledge and this is the reason EWB-NL was asked for help.

Goals

We aim to tackle the problems regarding water supply in the villages in the Oku region and to get the local communities back in control of their water systems, so they can ensure they have safe water for consumption.

Teams will visit Cameroon in phases to gather data, work with the communities and propose technical solutions.

Our goals are:

Provide Water Management Training
- Resource management training
- Water treatment training
- Asset management training
- Community communication plan
Create an Asset Management System
- Providing an Asset Registry Toolset
- Designing a maintenance plan
- Creating a list of suppliers
Create an Investment Plan to present to investors/funds to rehabilitate the water system

Main Activites

Main activities for this project are:

Visit Cameroon in teams and assess the water systems
Develop a detailed strategic plan on how to implement solutions for the drinking water supply issues per village, which can be picked up by any entity (including EWB-NL) to follow up on.
Train population and caretakers on how to keep the current structures and how to ensure safe drinking water.
Quick fixups (like catchment protection instructions) that are identified during the visit and don’t delay the planning.

Based on the feasibility study a project can be set-up to fix / new-build or improve the drinking water systems together with the local community, set-up a business / social model and implement the program.

Download this project’s information:

Flyer Water4Oku

Learn more Water4Oku

Want to sponsor this project?

EWB NL Sponsorship