The £15,000 that was raised from last year’s BigGive Christmas Challenge is already being put to good use in our partner schools.
Over the long holidays, work was undertaken to construct a permanent drinking and hand-washing station at Jora. This consists of two troughs, each with four taps, either side of a washroom and urinal building that straddles a dividing wall between the girls’ toilet area and the boys’. There is a 3,000 litre water storage tank to supply water, which is gravity fed from rainwater storage tanks elsewhere in the school.
We are also in the midst of a drive to significantly increase rainwater harvesting and water storage capacity across a number of our partner schools, to improve water security and resilience during times of drought especially.
An additional 40,000 litres capacity has already been added at Jora, with tanks added at the recently-completed dining hall and around the existing classroom block where water was going to waste.
Eight tanks with a combined capacity of 75,000 litres have recently been delivered to three partner schools which, over the coming weeks, will be connected to guttering and to piped supplies.
At Rukanga, where four of these tanks have been donated, broken and corroded metallic guttering on the main classroom block will be replaced with durable and lightweight PVC gutters, and an underground water piping system will be added to distribute water to central access points, including at the pupil toilets where permanent handwash facilities will be added, like those at Jora.
Further increases to rainwater harvesting and storage capacity at Ngambenyi and Kiteghe are also in the immediate pipeline, with tanks with a combined capacity of 30,000 litres already on order.
This work will take to around 750,000 litres the additional water storage capacity added across our partner schools with the help of AP over the years, the equivalent of approximately 250 litres per pupil place.
Please do keep an eye out on our social media pages or our new WhatsApp channel for further updates over the days, weeks and months to come!