Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Kedovo's project on Access to clean water

We all take for granted how easily it is to turn that tap of water and have fresh clean water flowing freely.
Everyday people from my village spend billions of hours every year walking for water. They bear the burden of walking for many kilometres to gather water from streams, rivers and ponds that are sometimes contaminated.



Clean water for my community means health, income and education. How??
Time spent walking to the river, resulting diseases keeping them from school, work and taking care of their families. All this affects the potentiality of the women in the community.When the children are freed from gathering water, they return to classes or do their homework easily and become more productive in school.
Access to clean water breaks the cycle of poverty.
Technologies in accessing clean water vary and so do costs. For my community we teamed up with a group of our coffee producers and the Kedovo gang in Kenya to determine the most sustainable means to provide access to clean and safe water. We settled on rain catchment that will have a long term impact and use a holistic approach and accountable over time.
Together with our funding partners; Bingo Projektförderung Schleswig Holstein - the Kedovo Wasertanks für Nyeri project began in Nov 2014 for a period of 1 year. The project is targeting 20 homesteads and 1 primary school within Kiganjo , Nyeri .


We engage the community in planning and installations of the watertanks that will be used for rain water catchment and storage. This may sound simple but in the bigger picture, our project contributes to an ambitious plan—the Millennium Development Goals (MDG)—that pledges to eliminate extreme poverty worldwide by 2015.


Ndurutu Village located between the Mt Kenya and The Aberdares receives enough rainfall that can be utilised as a means of safe clean water, not only for domestic use but also for setting up small garden/ vertical gardens to provide the communities with vegetables throught the year.
Ndurutu villagers spend hours each day retrieving water their families need to survive.As my people rely on coffee farming, the time-consuming retrieval process also diverts efforts from activities crucial to sustainable development, such as education and farming.



As a child , i grew up walking 1.5 kilometres to the Chania River to collect more than 40 litres of water everday. With the rest of the Kedovo gang, we struggled in the hot tropical sun, in the muddy november weather with 20 litres jericans strapped at our backs.
Three decades later, most of the kids from my village still struggle uphill with water jericans strapped at their backs. At Kedovo, we believe that creating acess to safe drinking water is the most powerful way to improve my community.


We educate communities so they can embrace clean water solutions.
By improving access to clean water we Improve sanitation.

Clean water transforms a communities......




Without our partners Nicole Boedtger and Heinz Papenhagen, this would not have been possible. And for this i thank them wholeheartedly from my heart.

And for Bingo funding- our sincere gratitude.

To all the great people who continue following us on our journey, thankyou for being part of the Kedovo/ Chania Coffee family, without you all this journey would have been so much harder.

To continue supporting our work,we are currently offeering coffee from Ndurutu Wet Mill, available F.O.T Bremen, transport to other destinations within the EU arrangable at extra cost. Pease contact Nicole Boedtger or Soni Schneidewind for Pricing, Samples and Contracting.

Our journey continues.

3 comments:

  1. It certainly didn't hurt to make sure that everyone in the community had a good source of water. And it was great that they were very open to the idea. It really takes a community to make something as worthwhile as this. A project like that will be very helpful to the locals, and promote a healthier well-being overall. Thanks for sharing!

    Verna Griffin @ Axeon Water Technologies

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Verna. Yes we believe it takes the commitment of a community to move forward. We are all looking forward to great development projects with this community in upcoming years.

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