Safe Water Access and Child Development
One-fifth of the world’s children don’t have enough water for their daily needs — and this drastically affects their development.
In August, we visited the Tom and Margaret Education Center in Mawotto Village, where H2O4ALL’s safe water project and its food sustainability project are beginning to make an impact. The borehole at the school provides for the whole community of Mawotto, but the students and staff at the school were among the first to benefit from having a safe water source close by. With enough water to maintain sanitation and less risk of waterborne diseases, Mawotto’s children can grow up healthy and get an education in safety. Safe water in the community has both drastically improved their lives at the moment, and given them a better shot at attaining a bright future.
Mawotto Village isn’t the only one of H2O4ALL’s client communities where water access is centered around the school. In 2016, we partnered with Servant’s Heart Ministries to install a safe water source at the Colegio Luz, Vida Y Amor in the Dominican Republic. The project included the installation of a cistern and a solar water purification system, along education on water maintenance and sanitation for the community. More than a hundred impoverished children were able to benefit from this project, along with their families and the school staff.
More recently, our recent Clean Hands Initiative includes several of our projects which are focused in schools. In Tsopoli Village in Ghana, we’ve concentrated our efforts towards providing water and repairing latrine facilities at the village primary school. In the Dominican Republic, we’re working to stop the spread of COVID-19 through vulnerable communities by promoting protective hygiene in schools. So far, ten schools have received access to safe water and soap, and two more are scheduled to benefit from the project in 2022.
Even in projects that focus more broadly on the whole community, the local schools are often some of the first places to receive water access points after the initial installation of the water source. Mulika Village in Kenya, the community of Nairiri in Kenya, and Kahama Village in Uganda all had water access points installed at their community’s primary schools as part of their safe water project, along with other water access points within the community.
Why do we focus on schools in our projects? On one hand, schools often make an excellent access point to reach the whole community. Sometimes, it’s the best way for families to access safe water. Children in water-stressed communities often have to collect water for their families, which may cut into school time; when the water source is at the school, they can collect water for their families there without having to make a long trip.
On the other hand, we focus on schools because schools are often the best way to reach a community’s children, and children are often the most vulnerable people in a water-stressed community. Growing up without safe water can impact a child’s physical and mental development, as well as their future. On the flip side, having steady access to safe water can change a child’s life indelibly, allowing them to grow up healthy and opening up pathways toward a brighter future.
Unsafe Water and Children’s Health
Community reliance on contaminated water can also do massive damage to a child’s health and their development. When a community uses an unprotected water source, its water supplies can easily become a vector for disease. Human or animal waste can contaminate the water source, spreading deadly waterborne diseases. In many countries, vaccines and relatively safe water have rendered most of these diseases virtually extinct. However, in many areas without access to safe water, these diseases are common and frequently deadly — and children are among the most vulnerable groups.
Waterborne diseases can severely affect a child’s development. Diarrheal diseases such as cholera and typhoid, which often proliferate in communities without safe water, cause patients to rapidly lose water and vital nutrients. Because of this, diarrheal diseases are a leading cause in malnutrition for young children worldwide. Furthermore, since one of the side effects of malnutrition is a weakened immune system, children who grow malnourished as a result of waterborne diseases are more vulnerable to dangerous diseases in the future.
Malnutrition can severely hinder a child’s development and damage their health well into adulthood. Children who experience malnutrition in the first few years of their lives run the risk of stunting, a chronic condition that impedes physical development. Children who suffer from stunting never reach their full height. They have a greater risk for diabetes and cancer than children who never suffered from stunting, greater vulnerability to contagious disease, and shorter overall life spans. They may suffer from cognitive disabilities and likely to struggle in school. As a result, children who suffer from stunting are 33 percent less likely to escape from poverty in adulthood.
In addition, water is crucial for sanitation and hygiene, and having safe water access is necessary for any community to protect itself from contagious disease. Without proper sanitation, homes, schools, and hospitals can all turn into vectors for disease, and this issue is dangerously common for schools in water-stressed communities. A 2018 UN report on water access states that more than 900 million children attend schools without handwashing facilities with safe water and soap.
What if a child or a teacher at one of these schools fell sick and came to school? The risk of contagion inside the school is dramatically higher than it would be if the school was able to maintain proper hygiene. It may become impossible for children to attend school without endangering themselves and their families. In addition, the fact that many of these children are already immunocompromised due to malnutrition only increases the risk of falling sick.
If safe water access isn’t introduced into the community, some children may spend long portions of their childhood repeatedly getting sick. Frequent bouts of illness can sap them of their strength and keep them out of school for long periods of time, preventing them from getting a complete education and limiting their opportunities for the future.
The physical impairments caused by sickness and malnutrition in childhood can prevent children from completing their education and hold them back when they reach adulthood. Unsafe water limits their opportunities and lowering their chances of escaping poverty. In order to help children in impoverished communities grow up into healthy, capable adults, safe water is a necessity.
Water and Education
Even outside the physical setbacks caused by dehydration, community water stress can hinder a child’s development and their shot at a better life by interfering with their education. In communities suffering from water stress, the prevalence of disease can make getting an education risky for many children; in addition, the burden of finding water saddles many children with responsibility that prevents them from getting a full education.
The responsibility of fetching water is one of the main problems usually cited when we talk about water access and education. When a family lacks easy access to safe water, it usually falls on one member of the family to collect water from the nearest source every day. Since adults are usually too busy to take care of this task, it often falls on children.
Depending on how far away the nearest source is, collecting water can take hours at a time. Some children may get up before the dawn in order to collect water before school starts. Others may leave after school and find themselves carrying water home long after dark, which leaves them at risk of getting lost or running into dangerous adults. In some communities, where the nearest water source is far enough away, the trip may take up most of the day and many children may not be able to attend school at all.
Another major issue is the lack of safe water and sanitation at schools. Nearly a third of the world’s schools lack basic sanitation services and water, according to a 2018 UN report. This means that millions of children go to school each day without being able to get a drink of water or use a safe toilet facility. In addition, the lack of adequate sanitation facilities at school poses other problems for girls.
No sanitation facilities at schools often means no privacy, which becomes a problem as female students begin hitting puberty. Many young women do not complete school because of the embarrassment and discomfort associated with having their period at school. Furthermore, dropping out of school often leaves adolescent girls with no choice but to marry and have children early. Girls who drop out and marry young are more likely to live and raise their children in poverty. They run a much higher risk of dying young in childbirth, and are more likely to see their children die before their fifth birthday.
Girls who complete their secondary education, on the other hand, wait longer on average before getting married and having children, and their children tend to be healthier. In addition, they are more likely to have their own income and break the cycle of poverty within their families. Their children, especially their daughters, are more likely to complete their own education and less likely to live in poverty. Therefore, having safe water and adequate sanitation at schools can be vital for improving the quality of life in a community, not only for the current generation of women and girls, but for their children as well.
In several projects, H2O4ALL has provided primary schools with water sources or water access points. One of these projects took place in Mulika Village, Kenya, and included a water access point at the local primary school. The school’s principal, Mr. Kevin Kingeru, reported on the changes they saw after the implementation of the project. Before the project, only seventy percent of the village’s girls were graduating from primary school; after the project was completed, the number increased to ninety-five percent. In addition, children miss fewer days because of sickness, since the community no longer relies on unprotected water sources and the risk of waterborne disease has gone down. As a result, more children are transitioning to secondary school and continuing their education.
In Mulika and many of our other projects, schools often see massive changes not long after safe water is introduced into the community. Children’s attendance rates rise; they are healthier and better equipped to Just having a safe water access point at the school can massively improve a child’s life and change the course of their education, giving them a shot at a better future.
The Future of Water Access
For communities like Mulika and Mawotto, things may be changing for the better. However, thousands of communities across the world still struggle to find water every day for want of a safe water source — and not all safe water interventions are built to last. Almost half of all safe water projects will fail within the decade after their implementation, and Africa has thousands of boreholes that are no longer in use. H2O4ALL had made an effort to avoid this outcome in our projects, by providing communities with the resources and training to maintain their sources and checking in on our client communities after the projects are finished.
In addition, changing climate conditions may exacerbate global water stress in the coming decades. Increasingly severe storms can damage existing water systems, causing communities to lose safe water access for long periods of time. And in many countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, natural water supplies are drying up. Families who rely on distant sources may find themselves needing to go farther and farther to find usable water. As the water crisis grows more severe for vulnerable communities around the world, more and more families will be raising their children without access to safe water.
Every child deserves to grow up with their basic needs met. Simply providing children in struggling communities with those necessities drastically increases their chances of finishing school and breaking the cycle of poverty. A single safe water source, shared by a community or school, can improve the quality of life for hundreds or even thousands of children — not just now, but in their future as well. As we work to provide struggling communities with safe water access, we help their next generation strive toward a better future for the whole community.
Thanks to Deo Kalule (Uganda), Zac Mulawa (Uganda), Francis Mutua (Kenya), Dario Nolasco (Dominican Republic), Saydee Gareston (Liberia), Peter Churchill (Uganda) for providing images, and thanks to Francis Mutua and Kevin Kingeru for providing information on the Mulika project.
