My Final

For my final, I decided to do option #2. I have researched all of the different problems surrounding water and sanitation throughout Africa, and although many of the needs are unique to the different geographical regions, many of them are general solutions that could assist Africa as whole.

For example, north Africa is naturally a water-scarce region yet much of their source of revenue relies on agriculture and farming. A way to fix this problem could be introducing some low-cost technologies like treadles for the crops, or simply cultivating crops that are more "water-efficient" meaning that they require less water and can actually feed more people.

Sub-Saharan Africa also suffers from water-scarcity, and as a result of this women and young children walk up to 3 or 4 hours a day just to get clean water! To put this into perspective, around 40 billion hours are lost annually just from hauling water! A possible solution for this problem unites education and water and sanitation...by placing Playpumps (refer to my last blog) near schools, kids would have a place to play and a source of water thus enabling the schools to have better sanitation and a safer environment.

Overall, the main problem in Africa seems to be that any kind of effort being made to provide clean water is being handled as an isolated issue by the government. Clean water and sanitation are both very local and individually-based issues, so the government trying to handle this issue without any communication with smaller communities isn't the most efficient technique. In addition to this, in case any one hasn't noticed, it seems like the majority of African problems are all related to one another, so trying to tackle this issue as a separate entity doesn't make a lot of sense. Ideas like the Playpump benefit children and also address multiple issues like water sanitation and education.

There are a near-infinite amount of websites that accept donations, and even just being aware of these issues helps to make a difference.

Ideas For My Final...

I have decided to work on option #2 for my final project. There are alot of water sanitation organizations online and, although they are all working towards the same task, they are working in different locations and utlizing different ideas to reach their goal. One really interesting site that I found uses the "playpump system", which is a sustainable water pump powered by playing children! They are installing the playpump near schools so it can provide clean water and a place to play (its like a merry-go-round).
Another site I found is the Samburu Project. The Samburu people are a nomadic tribe in Kenya, and theyre biggest problem comes from geography...they have no clean water. The Samburu Project decided a while ago to create fundraisers and donations so reach their goal of providing 25 wells to Samburu (around $12500 for each well) and they have already provided 22!! Each of these wells can help hydrate up to 2000 people...so needless to say its making a huge impact in the lives of these people!
Water for People is another organization, only they contibute to water sanitation on global level (including Africa), becasue this site is so large they actually have different people all over the world creating online journals of the impact theyre making on behalf on Water for People. They have a person (Sarah) in Uganda and Malawi recounting her experiences everyday, its a really great idea to have them making personal entries about their experiences there. Since its such a large organization, it can be easy to be a little skeptical or even overwhelmed, so the personal aspect of having these poeple reporting helps to make it a little less overwhelming.
This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as my resources are concerned, so obviously there are a lot of different and great ideas regarding this problem! I still have to map out what my own ideas will be in an attempt to make some sort of impact, but with all of these sites and ways to donate and get involved, Im sure I wont have a problem coming up with something!

Africa Aid...Water

After just googling "organizations for Africa" I found a ton of differnt groups, foundations and organizations all dedicated to helping Africa in a multitude of ways. The one I chose is called Africa Aid, they cover a few different issues in contemporary Africa (economy, education and water just to name some of them). Since I just researched the problem of deforestation in Africa and discovered that this problem directly links to the problem of clean water, I decided to research what Africa Aid is doing to help with water sanitation. Africa Aid has created (through fundraising) an Assessment and Action Team in Ghana, dedicated to researching and ultimately creating a clean water source in Buduburam (an area of Ghana). They are working with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and have gathered water sample data to take to San Diego (which Im assuming is the headquarters for their research team) and hopefully create a water filtration system for use with existing boreholes in the Buduburam. Its a really user-friendly site and you can make donations to Africa Aid to help with their funding for research and development of their plans. They also have little facts on the sides of all of their pages on the site to help give a sense of the vastness of Africa and the continent's poverty (one that I saw was that the world population is 6 billion...Africa's population is 780,000,000 and 27% of the entire world's population without clean water lives on the continent of Africa!!) Just from the small amount of research I did to create this blog, it opened my eyes to all of the different sites and foundations dedicated to JUST clean water! Theres so much to do and it awesome realize that the internet makes it that much more possible to make a difference in someone's life who is on the other side of the world, I'll probably end up doing more research about this topic and hopefully formulating my final around ways to help this problem.