Clean Water Nicaragua Project #12985

SHI: Safe Drinking Water for 20,000 Rural Families

by Self-Help International

SHI: Safe Drinking Water for 20,000 Rural Families

Project Report | Oct 4, 2017
Accounting for Clean Water

By Orlando Montiel Salas | Clean Water Program Officer

CAPS leaders from Buenos Aires, Nueva Guinea

Install a chlorinator with chlorine tablets, and they’ll drink clean water for a month. Teach a community to organize and they’ll drink clean water for a lifetime.

Since we launched our clean water intititive about five years ago, Self-Help has worked with more than 85 villages in 8 different municipalities in southern Nicaragua to help them access safer drinking water. About a quarter of the villages we serve are in the municipality of Nueva Guinea, where we've helped 27,338 people access clean drinking water on a daily basis.

Although in the initial training sessions, I help communities understand that there will be ongoing costs to chlorinate the water so it’s safe day in and day out, in my follow up visits with the village Clean Water Committee (CAPS) leaders, it became clear to me that not all communities have experience managing these ongoing communal costs, such as those necessary to cover expenses associated with water pumps, electricity to power the pumps, and chlorine tablets to keep the drinking water safe each month.

For example, in early June, we tested water in the Santa Fe community of Nueva Guinea. We observed contaminated water because the CAPS leaders did not regularly apply the chlorine tablets. Having a water chlorinator installed is not enough; there must be a sufficient supply of chlorine tablets to keep the water safe. While the average cost is affordable at just $6 per village per month, having clean water is dependent upon the ability of the CAPS to mobilize those funds when needed each month.

Santa Fe is not alone. Many of the communities that are in need of a water purification system have never had any type of water infrastructure nor the social infrastructure (i.e. calculating costs/coordinating communal payment of them) required to maintain such a system. So in mid-June, I met with the Nueva Guinea Mayor’s Office to plan workshops to train current and future members of village-level Clean Water Committees to better serve their communities.

I created a guide called, “How to Calculate the Initial and Ongoing Costs of Installing a Community Water System,” which gives step-by-step instructions on calculating the cost of installation, maintenance, and administration of a new water purification system, including setting an appropriate household maintenance fee. Now, every community has the same guidelines as well as the financial and infrastructural resources they need to effectively manage their local water system.

Self-Help then held three separate workshops from June 21 - 23 to ensure that as many CAPS leaders as possible were able to attend. Seventy leaders (20 women and 50 men) representing 23 of the 26 communities participated in the training workshops. In these workshops, we presented the guide and explained how the community leaders could use the system we devised to calculate costs and implement the necessary infrastructure for a water purification system. We also taught the leaders how to provide technical follow-up to their local Clean Water Committees, such as performing residual chlorine and Pathoscreen tests.

Based on the success of these training sessions in Nueva Guinea, we hosted the training session at the Fred Strohbehn Training Center in Rio San Juan on July 27. Six leaders of CAPS from four communities participated in the training session where they, too, learned the methodology for calculating the drinking water tariff rate, adjusted to the real costs and administrative expenses incurred by the maintenance of the CTI-8 Manual Chlorinators and monitoring of the water quality.

At the end of that meeting, the six CAPS leaders realized that their collection rates were unsustainable and that they needed to provide their communities with a report and recommendation to set new collection rates differentiated by real consumption of water. Participants of the training said they valued the session and went back to their communities with new tools to better manage their water systems. I continued conducting these trainings for community leaders during our follow up visits throughout August.

At Self-Help, we’ve always known that installing chlorinators alone isn’t enough: we must also offer training to help build capacity among local leadership to ensure the community gets the full benefits of clean water not only that first month, but for years to come. Community leaders must be able to maintain the system long term, both technically and financially. I'm confident that CAPS leaders in Nueva Guinea and across southern Nicaragua are now better equipped to provide their communities with clean water in a financially sustainable manner.

Thank you for your support of this important work, which is creating healthier families and communities across Nicaragua!

*ALL DONATIONS MATCHED TOMORROW!* GlobalGiving will match all gifts made Thursday, October 5 from 8am - 11pm Central, up to $1,000 per person! Set a reminder to donate tomorrow to make your gift go further. See complete terms & conditions here.

Leaders from Rio Plata, Nueva Guinea

Los Pintos leaders do their calculations

Calculating clean water in Jacinto Baca

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Jul 31, 2017
Nobody Likes Diarrhea (Seriously)

By Orlando Montiel Salas | Clean Water Program Officer

Migdalia, right, at a meeting teaching about CTI-8

After a sweltering day spent working on a farm, Julio heads home longing for a cool drink of water. The water that runs from his kitchen tap is brown and contaminated, but he is exhausted and dehydrated: what choice does he have? For as long as anyone can remember in Jacinto Baca, the water has not been safe to drink and the people have been plagued with diarrhea for something as simple as quenching their thirst. In this rural community in northern Nicaragua, 145 houses are occupied by1,053 people whose livelihoods are mostly agriculture, with the exception of a few small business owners, teachers, and health workers.

Migdalia is one of those health workers - a licensed nurse who is the head of the Health Clinic and has raised her two children in Jacinto Baca. A lifelong community member, she has witnessed and experienced personally the illnesses that come with consuming unsanitized water. In the past people were expected to sanitize their own water, which they did not always do, so diarrhea and stomach issues persisted in the community. They had grown so accustomed to living with the symptoms of contaminated water that they downplayed their health issues until the Ministry of Health examined and presented the high levels of contamination in the water.

Now, the water is chlorinated before it reaches the homes, so the water is clean and ready to drink as it exits the faucet. Migdalia says this change, thanks to the installation of the CTI-8 water chlorination device, has made all the difference, “As health workers, we have observed the importance of the CTI-8. Before there were many people sick with diarrhea, mainly children...now that we are using the chlorinator, the cases of diarrhea have decreased.” The inhabitants are educated on the changes brought by the CTI-8 and are asked to pay a small “water fee” to maintain the device and ensure that they will have clean water each month.

The plumber in charge of maintaining the CTI-8 is Bayardo Antonio, who, like Migdalia, is raising his two children in Jacinto Baca and has witnessed their suffering after drinking water that was not potable. Stomach problems were often blamed on the heat in the past but after the Ministry of Health’s testing and the installation of the CTI-8, the stomach pains and diarrhea have practically disappeared. Both Migdalia and Bayardo lived with the flawed water system in Jacinto Baca for over 30 years, so they are more than familiar with the problems it caused. Migdalia notes the benefits of the CTI-8 chlorination device, “Now, we drink water feeling assured and without worry, and we have noted a change in our health, and in the records we keep at the Health Clinic we have reached a milestone achievement in the decrease in cases of diarrhea and water-related ailments. We will continue using the CTI-8 to better the health of all community members.”

Since the installation, 1,053 residents of Jacinto Baca have received over 45,420 liters of safe drinking water every day. Thank you for giving this gift of health!

Bayardo displaying a sample of contaminated water

Bayardo (red hat) overseeing the setup of CTI-8

Links:

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May 15, 2017
41,000 receive clean water at the San Carlos Hospital with the installation of 5 new chlorinators

By Orlando Montiel Salas | Clean Water Program Officer

the hospital of San Carlos

The municipality of San Carlos is the capital of the department of Rio San Juan, Nicaragua. Within this territory is the city of San Carlos, which contains one of the major hospitals for the region. The hospital is responsible for all 4 municipalities that make up the department— San Juan de Nicaragua, El Castillo, San Carlos, and San Miguelito, Morrito.

According to statistical information provided by the hospital, approximately 49,700 will have visited the hospital by the end of this year. In just January and February alone, 2,671 men and 5,616 women have visited. Their ages range between less than 1 year to 60 years and over.

The hospital has over 250 employees working in the areas of medical care, statistics, administrative staff, cleaning, and cooking. They also have staff who are tasked with ensuring the water provided by the storage tanks is received through the potable water distribution network of the company ENACAL of San Carlos.

However, water supplied to the hospital lacks the chlorine concentration at a level adequate enough to disinfect and purify all of it for the amount of individuals served— and did not guarantee that it was completely safe for consumption. This was a very obvious problem for the hospital administration and authorities, which led them to think and look for alternative solutions to the big problem they were facing: how they could improve their water quality.

In August of 2016, the San Carlos hospital management staff decided to contact us and tell us about the water quality issue they were having. We decided we would need to have a meeting with several leaders and the administration of the hospital.

The result of the meeting with us and the hospital authorities was the decision to carry out a technical inspection on the water system and then to install one of Self-Help’s CTI-8 chlorinators.

The Self-Help International Clean Water Program in Nicaragua, in coordination with the management of San Carlos Hospital, installed five (5) CTI-8 manual chlorinators, which currently guarantee the quality and safety of water within the hospital's facilities. The first CTI-8 manual chlorinator was installed on Thursday, January 19, 2017, in a tank with capacity for 5,000 liters of water, to supply the maternity and neonatal room inside the Hospital. The people that will directly begin to benefit from this each year are 471 newborns, and 3,436 pregnant and postpartum women. The last of the five chlorination systems was installed on March, 18^th, 2017. The five chlorination systems installed cover the hospital’s pediatrics, general medicine and orthopedics, maternity, surgery, and emergency centers.

In April, the systems were tested for monitoring and evaluation. The results showed that the chlorination systems had successfully eliminated the problem of poor water quality in the Hospital de San Carlos. The Country Program Director and I provided educational talks to nursing staff, maintenance, cleaning, laboratory, administrator, doctors and directors of the hospital, regarding the use, management, and maintenance of the CTI-8 manual chlorinator. We hoped to expand the knowledge about the importance of reliable and clean water, and demonstrate the sustainability of the chlorinator equipment, in order to effectively communicate. They needed to understand why the correct amount of chlorine was so vital.

The Director of the hospital told SHI staff, “Now we have a good perception of the quality of the water that we have, and I feel happy because before it was a headache to talk about the quality of the water in this hospital beforehand--people criticized us on this subject, but we can say at any moment and in any meeting, we have water of good quality and safe for the population we serve. Now people who visit the hospital of San Carlos, for consultations, appointments, emergencies, or hospital admission of any kind, are sure to take and use the drinking water inside the hospital.”

Since the 5 chlorination systems have been installed, we can now say with ease that the 41,000 visitors of the hospital each year will have safe water for all of the hospital’s needs.

SHI staff and Hospital Directors hold meeting

one of the five new chlorinators installed

SHI staff educating visitors about clean water

a typical day showing the traffic of the hospital

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