Water for Everyone | The Gambia

"Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and therefore a basic human right” Kofi Annan

 Water for Everyone  is a 3-country border-to-border initiative encompassing Liberia, The Gambia, and Togo – to provide safe water to the entire population. This is a goal we share with many other organizations and requires the collective effort of all parties (and the generosity of amazing donors like you!) to collaborate for successful and sustainable implementation.

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In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly agreed upon 17  Sustainable Development Goals .  Sustainable Development Goal 6  (SDG6 or SDG 6) calls for clean water and sanitation for all people. In light of SDG6, Water Charity’s goal is to provide a basic supply of potable water to every person in The Gambia by the end of 2023.

The Gambia is the smallest country in mainland Africa and one of the poorest in the world. Poverty in The Gambia is largely a rural phenomenon. The country's poverty rate directly correlates with the its reliance on agriculture; volatile rainfall leads to inconsistent agricultural yield. Lack of infrastructure, particularly lack of efficient water management systems, is largely responsible for the low productivity of smallholder farms.

Water Management falls to the country’s Department of Water Resources, which plays a leadership role and interacts individually with donors who finance rural water systems.

With no formal system to provide rural water, let alone maintain the water systems, over 60 percent of The Gambia’s rural wells are broken. This problem is not just restricted to The Gambia; as much as 30-50% of rural water projects fail after two to five years. From a development perspective, water sector efforts in low-income countries present a long history of failure. 

The lack of sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions has had devastating consequences. Women and girls have borne the brunt of this long history of water system sustainability failure: with their time and labor.

So how to go about the overwhelming mission of providing working water to everyone in The Gambia?

Water for Everyone combines the use of the traditional techniques of person-to-person water surveying on motorbikes with the newer technologies of GPS-enabled mobile technologies and GIS mapping.

Water Charity uses GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present data. We have completed a border-to-border assessment of the water needs of The Gambia. We are now doing conducting a second-level assessment of the resources needed to carry out the specific interventions.

The types of projects we will do include pump repairs, minor borehole rehabilitation, new borehole, rainwater capture and storage, and water filtration. We will carry out the appropriate testing protocols to ensure the water is safe for humans to drink.

We signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Water Resources, who told us, in no uncertain terms, that the region most in need of water was the Central River Region. Then, we recruited surveyors from the Departments of Water and Community Development. And, recently, from the Department of Health as well. 

The surveying process was then broken down into five phases, by region, as shown below:

Building solutions through partnerships

Along with developing a map to divide, manage, and prioritize the work...

...partnerships are key to making our gargantuan task doable.

GIS Mapping became a part of the border-to-border strategy by way of Sawyer, an American company that sold camping equipment to the first world backpacking market and saw a role for their water filters in the developing world. 

A few of Sawyer’s enterprising employees founded an offshoot of Sawyer—Sparrow Data Solutions--to help nonprofits use GIS to manage their development projects

Liberated from the obligation of fetching water because of increased water access, women and girls are free to focus on development of themselves and their communities. We have partnered with  GambiaRising  and  Trees for the Future  to add an education and income-generation component, respectively, for further community development. Education will help empower women and income generation will ensure a community fund for maintenance, repair, and eventual replacement of the water sources.

The fact remains that in Africa, too many well-meaning organizations build wells without considering what will happen when they break in communities too poor to buy parts or hire a contractor.

We have undertaken the daunting task of ensuring access to water for everyone, but we cannot do it by ourselves. First and foremost, we need donations to implement the projects. However, we also ask for your help in spreading the word about this amazing endeavor through all of your communications channels. If this work is of importance to you, please contact us and tell us how you would like to help.