Millennium Promise - Extreme Poverty Ends Here

Children under five are at greatest risk of dying from diarrheal diseases contracted from contaminated water. By providing basic sanitation for households, contamination can be greatly reduced.

Community members are contributing the labor to excavate pits for the latrine. Residents will be hired to build new latrines with PVC pipe ventilation. Radio programs will promote a public service campaign to explain the benefits of basic sanitation. The project goal of $10,000 provides 100 households with latrines, decreasing disease and improving water safety for over 500 people.

This practical, yet direct, response is one of many successful applied approaches that enable Millennium Villages to provide cleaner water in the short term, while laying the foundation for longer term solutions.

Before Millennium Villages interventions, safe water coverage was only 20% in Ruhiira. A major factor was the lack of basic sanitation. With population growth and deforestation, runoff often polluted the region’s water sources. At one clear spring about a mile away, people started lining up at 5 am to draw water, causing absenteeism and tardiness in schools—especially for girls who are usually tasked with such chores. Since 2007, safe water coverage has increased to 45%. More than 60 water sources—springs, ponds and wells—have been protected and constructed and 90 rainwater harvesting tanks installed in schools, health centers and public places.

Water safety improvements in Ruhiira are allowing the community to make significant progress on Millennium Development Goal # 7: Ensure Environmental Sustainability, and simultaneously impact both Goal #6: Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases, and Goal #4: Reduce Child Mortality.

In this photo, community leaders run a training session to teach village residents effective water purification methods.

Many safe water initiatives, such as building wells and piped water systems, must be coordinated on a village level. But two important practices are critical to safe drinking water—purifying water at home and effective use of latrines—and only by educating thousands of individuals will these initiatives succeed.

Asiimwe Museveni John is a Senior Community Health Worker in Ntungu Parish and responsible for 155 households. At first he wasn't convinced the community needed to invest in Pur tablets to purify water in homes. He couldn't understand, why not just have everyone boil water? But his visits to his clients in their homes shed critical light: "During my regular household visits, I discovered that many households would not boil drinking water, mostly because there was no firewood for cooking and some said the water would smell smoke from the dry leaves they used for boiling the water." Armed with that understanding, he has become much more successful in encouraging people to use the Pur system effectively.

Julius Musinguzi is a Senior Community Health Worker in Bugongi parish. Like his colleague, he has been working on the education aspect of latrine use. "In my parish, I cover 208 households. Since I started the sensitization campaigns on latrine usage, the latrine coverage in the area has greatly improved. All the households I am responsible for have pit latrines."

In this photo, Agaba Bosco and Mutungi Asaph are digging a deep pit which will become a latrine ditch. Thanks to our fundraising project, Provide Latrines in Uganda and Clean Up Water, a crew of local workmen will be paid to construct an improved-style latrine with project-supplied materials including PVC pipe ventilation on this site. Improved ventilation is key to making the latrines a livable solution, until other infrastructure improvements can be made.

The latrine project is critical for cleaning up water supplies in the area because they have been contaminated by runoff from farm animals and human waste, resulting in a high rate of water-born diseases such as cholera and diarrhea and contributing to increased child mortality. Children under five are most in danger of dying due to diarrhea.

David Siriri, the Science Coordinator who ensures projects meet both the goals of the local community as well as the milestones necessary to meet the UN Development Goals explains why projects like Providing Latrines are critical for success:

“My biggest motivation is seeing people’s lives transformed. I have for the last 12 years worked with different research and development agencies but never before has my work made real community transformations like at the Millennium Villages Project. What is different here is having an integrated holistic approach to development in which all issues affecting human livelihoods are tackled at the concurently, empowering communities to take lead in planning their future and investing their own resources in implementing their chosen interventions, and having significant development assistance that reaches the intended target. These key ingredients have combined to bring hope and dignity to the many lives that were bound by shackles of extreme poverty.”

Check back to see how the project is doing, and remember to encourage your friends to consider making a donation.

This photo shows how people in Ruhiira cook in a typical Ugandan kitchen. The stoves or firepits can be very inefficient, burning large quantities of fuel, and sending unhealthy fumes into the air. Replacing those stoves with fuel efficient, low-emission models will improve the deforestation of the environment, air quality and lung function for people. Stove replacement is just one of the many holistic initiatives that the Uganda team's science coordinator discusses in the interview below, when he explains why the project is so successful.

What is your role in the project?
My name is David Siriri, the Science Coordinator of the Ruhiira Millennium Villages Project. I am responsible for ensuring sound technical design and implementation of project activities in a way that responds to the project model and community priorities. I also conduct measurements, monitoring and activity evaluation to generate data that informs project design and track achievement of project targets.
What progress has been made since 11/30/2009?
The community health workers continued to be the first responders in providing basic treatment and referring patients to health units. As a result, prevalence and severity of malaria continued to decline while monthly child births in all health units now stands at over 400. The project registered zero maternal death in the cluster during December 2009. The emergence medical response system has been strengthened with nurses trained in emergence handling and ambulance dispatch. The operating theatre at Kabuyanda health unit is now functional after a few months breakdown. Clinical staff have been trained in use of medical equipment donated by General Electric and can now perform scans for better pregnancy management. The number of households using water treatment chemicals has increased after an initial cultural resistance. As a result, the diarrhea disease burden at health units has decreased. Villagers started using improved cook stoves introduced by MVP. This has reduced indoor air pollution which causes respiratory tract diseases and has saved up to 45% of cooking fuel wood in families using the stoves. New roads were opened and old ones rehabilitated, increasing accessibility to markets and health units.
How important is this project to you?
My biggest motivation is seeing people’s lives transformed. I have for the last 12 years worked with different research and development agencies but never before has my work made real community transformations like at the Millennium Villages Project. What is different here is having an integrated holistic approach to development in which all issues affecting human livelihoods are tackled at the concurently, empowering communities to take lead in planning their future and investing their own resources in implementing their chosen interventions, and having significant development assistance that reaches the intended target. These key ingredients have combined to bring hope and dignity to the many lives that were bound by shackles of extreme poverty.

One great thing about getting involved with a Millennium Village in Uganda, is that there’s a lot that people in the developed world can learn about the amazing social organization and mutual support that can be found in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. The most local level of organization is the village that consists of 50 to 70 households and 250 to 1,000 people, depending on family size. Everyone participates in a local council, which is governed by a chairman and a 9-person executive committee.

Before any village joins the Millennium Village project, the local council must vote to participate, select key initiatives to work on, and contribute 15 percent of project costs. Here’s how one LCI (local committee level 1) chairman views the Millennium Village project, from the perspective of the area’s very first village, Ruhiira—this is where the initial research was conducted and where residents first voted to join the Millennium Villages.
An interview with Tindyebwa Johnson, Farmer and LCI Chairman Ruhiira cell:
“Before the MVP project came, we were badly off. We lacked good health services, the roads were poor and inaccessible, the schooling conditions were very poor and generally life was miserable. The MVP has within a short time done what would have taken government over 100 years to do. Now we have enough food to eat and we are making good money from selling bananas because the roads are now very good and farmers have been involved in several trainings and are now in registered groups. The health facilities are now fully functional and well equipped, classrooms have been built and children can now eat at school.

Me as a person, I am now seeing great change in the community, business is now moving fast. I now find it easy to lead my people because the services are good. Many of our community members have now got jobs because of MVP, some of the facilitators, enumerators, health staff, radio staffs have got jobs”.

"Since I'm from Japan, I’ve experienced my fair share of ludicrously high-tech toilets," says Naomi Handa Williams, an intern from Millennium Promise Japan, newly arrived in Ruhiira. "Think heated seats and a confusing array of buttons which produce hot water, gusts of air, singing…you name it." Yet when Naomi witnessed first-hand the huge leap between the new design of latrines for Ruhiira and its predecessor, she felt as if it were a technological advance that could rival the Japanese! "Although," she admits, "you’d be forgiven for considering the new design latrine still somewhat ‘primitive’."

‘So this is the old design latrine…and this is the new design!’ says Hillary, who is on the MVP Infrastructure team, and in this photo is proudly showing Naomi the bold new structure.

To date, 215 household latrines have been completed within the Kisyoro and Bugonji parishes in Ruhiira, with many more in progress. They are all constructed using local materials, the labor shared between professionals and the households themselves, which is crucial in providing the new owners with a sense of ownership and investment. Each household is required to dig their own pit, which must be 30 feet deep.

"Looking down into one of the pits I realized what painstakingly slow and hard work it must be, with an improvised pulley made from a jerrican and string used to transport the dug up earth to the top," says Naomi.

"This is the bit which most slows down the building process, as people don’t have the time to be doing such things," Hillary tells her. "It is very time-consuming - they need to earn a living too!" Once the pit is complete, a skeleton erected from eucalyptus is tied together using banana fibres, before being fitted with an iron roof, a vent pipe, and a door. Each household is given a half bag of cement to lay on the floor, to make for easier cleaning and improved hygiene, as well as a sand plat, which serves as a solid, washable platform above the pit. Once this is completed, mud patching helps fill the gaps between the eucalyptus branches, with the final touch being a spreading of cow dung and sand mixture over the walls to create a smooth finish.

The funding project posted on GoodAdds, "Provide Latrines in Uganda and Clean Up Water," aims to address some of these difficulties by engaging local construction crews, paying them for their work and providing oversight and guidance.