GAiN Water for Life and education

•    An estimated 140 million children are out of school and among them 80% live in in Africa (UNESCO)
•    Girls and women spend an average of three hours per day collecting water from distant sources. (WTN, 2007)
•    Every year of education a woman receives increases the likelihood of survival for her children by 15% (UNICEF)

Education is of immense importance but for large groups in the third world also almost unreachably far away. Hundreds of millions of children live in houses and town without good facilities as clean water, toilets and schools.
And if there is a school, many of the kids have no time or energy to concentrate because they are sick or (in the case of the girls) have to help getting water and doing other chores to help the family.
Drilling a deepwater well in or near a village reduces these problems in several ways.
Because the water is not only clean, but also closer, the health of the villagers improves remarkably. More available water means better hygiene and a better life, especially for the children. As a result they have more energy and time to go to school.
Adding a well on the schoolgrounds – which are many time centrally located between villages makes the schools also a very effective place to teach about hygiene and other related issues. This kind of info actually spreads faster from the children to the parents then the other way around.
Also school are the center of other initiatives in the sphere of livelihood programs that help the children and the community. The next story is an example of this…

At a school in Tanzania, the students have developed a vegetable garden behind the school. Because of the presence of plenty of water from the well they can irrigate the plants well so they have a good harvest.
They cook the vegetables at school and eat them as part of their daily food.

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