Water, sanitation and hygiene training in Kaliro, Uganda

In May, CO2balance in-country partner WAACHA conducted WASH training in Kaliro District, Uganda.

The purpose of the annual training is to sensitise the communities on important issues such as keeping the area around the borehole clean and storing water correctly. The training takes place every year to reinforce these values.

These important visits ensure that the project boreholes can be properly maintained by the communities, thus protecting the long-term future of the water point. The practises and techniques taught also help protect the groundwater from contamination and ensure that the water is stored safely at home.

The Kaliro Safe Water project reduces CO2 emissions by providing communities with safe water, so they no longer need to boil water with firewood as a treatment method. The WASH training are used along side water quality testing to ensure that the communities are consuming safe water year round. As well as reducing CO2 emissions, this project provides safe water to rural communities and cuts cases of water-borne diseases and diarrhoea.

The taste of clean water

When developing a borehole project, one might think that the hardest part is the physical rehabilitation and the siting of the boreholes. However there are many challenges which appear only in the second phase of the project, once the boreholes are providing safe water. We have met one of these challenges when some locals reported that the water from our freshly rehabilitated boreholes is salty and not palatable for few users in our Rwandan project. These feedback were unexpected because the water quality tests carried out by a recognized laboratory showed that all tested parameters are well within the acceptable range. What could have been the problem then?

According to our field team, locals have been drinking warm and dirty water from lakes and pond which might have tasted sweeter than the fresh and clean water coming from the boreholes. Our NGO partner reported about similar experience in other clean water project.

The laboratory has also confirmed that the underlying reason is that groundwater often has higher levels of dissolved solids than surface water because of its contact with aquifer geologic material and more time to dissolve rock and mineral materials. To explore the issue more in-depth, conductivity of the borehole water was tested, which is an indicator of the amount of dissolved salts and used to estimate the amount of total dissolved solids (TDS) rather than measuring each dissolved constituent separately. This is an important parameter for drinking water because high TDS values may result in a ‘salty’ taste to the water.

All our TDS results for our rehabilitated boreholes have been well within the limit and range required in the “WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, Fourth Edition” and we found it important to share it also with our local borehole users. The issue has been incorporated into the WASH education and community sensitization programme to make sure that people are aware why the borehole water may taste “salty” after years of drinking surface water. The success of the WASH programme is confirmed by the field team and in-country partners but also by the usage survey which now shows 100% usage of the rehabilitated boreholes.