Kenya 2014 - By James Haughton

Well I’m coming to the end of another trip to visit projects here in Kenya. It has been a useful trip. It is easy in the UK to lose track of how things work over here and the challenges that local people face. Life is very difficult for people here but there is genuine hope and heaps of potential.

What’s “Africa”? Its 1 billion people, 53 countries and maybe 3,000 languages. It’s impossible to simplify about one nation, made up of many tribes such as Kenya, and generalising about a continent is plain dangerous. Each community and tribe has its own dynamics and social systems. It was really hammered home this trip how important it is that our Field Officers originate from those contexts in which we work with the locally elected water committees. This is a direction in which we have been moving over the past few years.

While I’m on the topic of generalisations just type “African child” into google images and compare it to “European child”. It’s sad for me to see the results of the former search with every other image a child in tears or a victim of disaster or famine. I do not deny the suffering of many, but rather it is the representation of hopelessness that pervades our conceptions of “Africa” that irritates me.

One thing that humbled me this trip was meeting so many Head Teachers that provided free places (no free schooling in Kenya) to orphaned and destitute children. Such charity has a very detrimental effect on the economy of the school but nonetheless this is a society that does what it can to help its neighbour.
It’s surprising even to me know how a water project at a school can have unanticipated benefits. Increasingly access to clean water attracts new students, encourages children to board instead of walking kilometres a day and thus increases the budget of the schools to reinvest in staff. At Rotik school in Ndanai region I spoke to the deputy head about his water supply and was taken aback at his estimate of how much the school pays a week for the transport of water, £51, when the average salary of one of his staff a week was just £10.

What’s worse is that the donkey fetched water from a spring 2 miles away contains unsafe levels of bacteria and contaminants. But it’s deemed worth 5 teachers’ salaries a week because it is essential to the existence of the school and education in that district.

I am optimistic about the future of Kenya and of Africa as a continent. By cooperation with those who know what needs fixing in their communities we can open up opportunities, beyond the immediate health benefits of clean water, to remove barriers and aid the development of stronger schools and local economies.

First Kenya visit of 2014 - By Ben Skelton

I’m about to travel out to Kenya to spend three weeks working with Dig Deep’s locally based staff. Here’s what we’ll be getting up to.

As soon as I land in Nairobi we’ll be meeting with local supporters and partners to plan our next round of school education project. Why is a water charity getting involved in education you might well ask?

Well, we know that making sure kids are washing their hands with soap at critical times and using toilet facilities can be just as important for health as making sure they have access to a clean water supply. However, teaching kids to do this is no easy task, especially if your school has only just got access to clean water and toilets.

This is why we are providing training for teachers in rural Kenya in the very best ways of getting these messages across to their students – often through using the power of fun, interactive games to help kids figure out the solutions themselves.

After these meetings in Nairobi its off to the rural communities where our projects take place. We’ll be monitoring the progress of a whole host of different projects – from a large scale deep well which will soon be providing water to a whole community, to simple interventions in schools involving hygienically capturing rainwater and building simple toilet blocks.

In doing this we will be working in partnership with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community groups who live and work in the communities we serve. Working with these partners is vital to the success of our projects. Not only do their staff and volunteers speak the local language(s) and understand their communities, they also bring other specialist knowledge to the table.

Just to give you an example, one of these partnerships is with the Olare Orok Motorogi Trust (OOMT) who work on the periphery of the Masai Mara. The vision of OOMT is to ensure the long-term conservation of the Maasai Mara ecosystem through empowering periphery communities to gain significant and tangible benefits from conservation.

Over the last three years we have worked with OOMT to support and improve existing community water projects and install rainwater harvesting in schools. OOMT are able to advise us on the best locations for new water projects to reduce human wildlife conflict by ensuring that herdsmen no longer have to take their cattle to water sources that are in areas inhabited by endangered animals such as lions and elephants.

Right, I need to get packing - we’ll be sending out video updates over the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Here's to 2014 - By Anna Banyard

Coming home for Christmas, me realising its really cheese and crumpets that fills that little hole in my heart, and patting pets and smooth roads, young person’s rail cards and Dad’s signature casserole (and of course family and friends) is over for another year! Winter in the UK is brutally chilly compared to the equatorial sun of Kenya but for me there’s nothing like the feeling of that familiar sofa at Mum’s and when you step on the fallen pine needles around the tree trying to turn off the fairy lights. Some good rest time almost over, nearly time to get back to Kenya to crack on.

I always find that it’s at the beginning of January where you’re encouraged to look forward to what you imagine the fresh New Year to hold, and a lot of my New Year excitement is for Dig Deep in 2014.

2014 will see the progression of partnerships between communities, NGOs and government bodies, it will see cooperation, mutual respect and team work, and it will see focus groups, baseline surveys and capacity building. It will see water, sanitation and hygiene improvements in schools and communities in remote areas of Kenya.

Schools and communities will benefit from the installation of the most sustainable and appropriate water and sanitation solutions for them, which they have identified, discussed, chosen and worked towards. Pupils will participate in hygiene promotion game days, where the objective is to receive strictly positive messages teaching good hygienic practises for staying healthy and strictly to have fun while doing it. Communities will be invited to attend festivals in their villages, people dressed up as giant bars of dancing soap with entertainment all day in the name of outreach, to explain and demonstrate water filtration technologies and how they are available to people if they believe that it would improve their current way of living. Communities will no longer be limited to drink water that makes them suffer water related diseases, or long collection times, or high cost, or low quality or high risk or low supply. I am looking forward to listening to the voices of the villagers and assisting them to develop solutions to some of their water, sanitation and hygiene challenges.

Here’s to the New Year being better than we can imagine. *clink*

Talking crap saves lives - by James Haughton

As much as we know here at Dig Deep that providing clean water is just part  of the battle of improving community health, its tough to talk about crap. 2.5 billion people lack access to a toilet. Just 1 gram of faeces can contain 1,000 parasite cysts, 1 million bacteria, 50 diseases, 100 worm eggs and 10 million viruses. The problem is breathtaking and it is small wonder 50% of the hospital beds in the world are taken by those suffering from water borne diseases. Building toilets saves lives and wherever we can we invest in sanitation alongside our projects in Kenya. Do take a moment to watch this fabulous TED talk from Rose George.

Lion Roadblocks - by Ben Skelton

Hi everyone,

It’s been a few years now since I was doing the final year of my degree and attempting to avoid writing my dissertation by reading an email that had landed in my inbox from ‘Dig Deep’ – a small water charity looking for volunteers to fundraise for and manage projects in Kenya. I liked the charity’s approach to Development – using appropriate technologies and education programmes to help local people transform their own lives – so I sent them a quick email asking for some more info. As it turned out, this 5 minutes of procrastination has had a significant impact on my life.

 

Ben on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

18 months later - after having persuaded a close friend to take on the challenge with me and juggling countless hours of fundraising with finals/full time work – I found myself living in the Kenyan bush with Dig Deep’s Maasai partners, helping to fund and manage two large scale water projects. It was unforgettable seeing first-hand the complex social and political challenges of operating in the field, as well as experiencing the serious practical obstacles to development in communities with no paved roads, no utilities of any sort and a serious - and at times surreal - wildlife presence (you never really get used to  missing a meeting due to a pride of lions blocking the track).

The experience has driven me on to keep the charity growing so that we can support more and better projects. The reason I love my work is summed up in this recent video interview with Jacob.  He’s a teacher at Endonyo Rinka Primary School, the school that I first worked with in Kenya over two and a half years ago. Like all of our media posts this video is very simple – we just turned the camera on and asked Jacob to describe in his own words life since the project’s completion.

 

Ben inspecting the tanks at Endonyo Rinka!

What comes across is the impact that a small intervention can have. All we did was work with the school to install appropriate water technologies that are simple and cheap to maintain, as well as supporting Jacob and other staff in improving the sanitation and hygiene education available to their pupils.

The result? Students and staff no longer have to walk miles to collect water from contaminated dams shared with livestock and wild animals. This has improved the health of everyone at the school, where previously water borne diseases were taking a serious toll. Also, thanks to the hard work of Jacob and his colleagues, the student’s academic performance has increased and the school has been able to open boarding facilities, so that now over 700 children can reap the benefits of an education. In short it has made a tangible and sustainable difference to their lives.

I’m now looking forward to working with our volunteers, partners and supporters in Kenya, the UK and across the world to help hundreds more schools and communities to achieve the same success.

Introduction from our Country Director - by Anna Banyard

Currently Dig Deep is a young, strong, developing organisation which makes it a very exciting place of work. Being the only international member of staff permanently based on the ground in Kenya it is for me to spend time living with communities in which we work, in their schools and villages to build long lasting links with these people and the organisation. It is my task to encourage and engage the local people, at the household level to drive our projects in order to reach the most sustainable and appropriate solution to their water and energy needs. My role is to guide the community through the processes of project planning, community fundraising, implementation and construction and crucially, monitoring and evaluation.

The wide range of technology options Dig Deep consider to relieve the challenges faced by rural Kenyan communities ensures that the communities benefit from the most appropriate solutions. Dig Deep work to communicate sufficient information on different project infrastructure options or water supply sources so that the community are able to make an informed decision that coupled with our experience and advice leads to the optimum solution.

To date Dig Deep have carried out many different types of water source supplies and considers each community as a case by case. Rainwater Harvesting, Filtration, Boreholes, and Shallow wells are all types of water supply that we have developed in partnership with the community. Together we are planning to implement a shallow borehole and spring catchment project in the future coupled with sanitation provisions and hygiene promotion.

My academic background as an engineer assists the technical aspects of project planning and comes in to play to carry out calculations to size pipe distribution networks, design flow rates and tank elevations amongst other things. Using land surveying techniques that I work with both literate and illiterate community volunteers to implement, we plan the project very precisely to be certain that the investment we make using both our donor’s money as well as the money contributed by the community will allow the system to operate in the way it is expected to.

A lot of my interaction with the communities are through an elected board of members of a Water/Project Committee, and I speak through volunteer interpreters who live at the sites of our projects, however I am currently undergoing Swahili language training every week to strengthen my interactions with project beneficiaries, contractors and suppliers.

The scope of my work is very diverse and is difficult to summarise in one blog post, so I hope to provide better insight by regularly posting to discuss what is happening on the ground out here in Kenya.

Why Dig Deep? - by James Haughton

James Haughton

I took up the post of Executive Director in May this year to work with Ben Skelton who had almost single-handedly nurtured the Dig Deep we know now. For the best part of two years prior to that I had the privilege of being a Trustee of Dig Deep and overseeing the transformation of the organisation from a student enterprise to the strong organisation it is today. I'm going to take a few moments to explain why Dig Deep has become a life passion for me. It answers a question I get asked a lot by old friends and new acquaintances: Why Dig Deep?

Dig Deep is a young charity, established in 2007, but also youthful in terms of the staff that drive it. All of our full time staff are under 30 years old, as are three of our trustees. It is reflected in our attitude to innovative development solutions such as wind and solar pumps and biogas as a solution for fuel poverty at institutions across Kenya. Additionally it breeds an exciting and energetic environment to work in.

For me personally, it is our shared ethos as development professionals, borne of our educations in institutions rife with charity scepticism (much of it justified) and observations in the field, that has captivated me and drives us on. The tangible benefits of clean, safe drinking water and hygiene education are well established but the crisis of water poverty is still chronically under reported. Every project completed by Dig Deep and charities like us, and every thousand people we alleviate from the scourge of disease, compromised education and economic disadvantage is a worthy part of a global struggle.

Our "ethos" is simple but distinctive; a heart-felt belief that the people we work with in Kenya are the experts in their communities, not us. By partnering with locally elected water committees and local partner organisations we listen to the communities, engage them in critical decision making, learn from them and offer support where they identify they lack skills-typically with sustainable business models to allow the community to maintain the projects themselves. In charity jargon it's called 'Community Led Development'-in our eyes it is common sense!

Before and after at Kagasek Secondary School,
Kenya, with many of the 1,000 attendees of
the opening ceremony in the background.

I always come back to the mantra "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you feed him for life". Charities have understandable concerns about their own survival as organisations but, in my opinion, good development is about identifying the end game as early as possible and working to make yourself redundant as quickly as is responsible to do so. This is best for those we work with and the most efficient use of our donor's money. It is done by developing the capacity of our beneficiaries to solve their own problems. It comes down to building relationships that are equitable and not hierarchical, sharing resources so as to leave knowledge behind, treating each community based upon their own character rather than using a one size-fits-all approach and setting out to learn as one empowers and builds capacity. It is this approach and the positive way in which our partners respond to it that gets me jumping out of bed each morning for Dig Deep. 

The supply of water has been reduced by its ease of access in our lives to a conception of infrastructure; engineering, pipes, taps and plumbing but, as with all development, it is as much about effective human relationships as it is nuts and bolts. 

James Haughton is the Executive Director of Dig Deep, with primary responsibilities for fundraising, policy and governance matters. He can be contacted on james@digdeep.org.uk

UPCOMING ON DIG DEEP'S BLOG: FURTHER INTRODUCTIONS FROM THE TEAM