Safe water is on its way to a crowded slum

 

 

Top: A girl stands next to an open sewer, a typical scene in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Bottom: Mike Klingbiel helps with the construction of one of the bathroom facilities in Kibera.

Residents of the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, use one of the pay-per-use pit toilets that service the settlement – if they can afford it. But if they can’t, they resort to using what are colloquially known as “flying toilets,” plastic bags that are then left to litter one of the largest slums in Africa.

It’s a situation that Rotarians are working to change.

Using a $330,000 Health, Hunger and Humanity (3-H) Grant, the Rotary clubs of Denver Southeast, Colo., USA, and Nairobi-Langata, Kenya, are partnering to build shower and bathroom facilities for about 150,000 residents of Siranga, one of nine villages in Kibera. These “wet cores” tap into Nairobi’s water and sewer systems, providing clean city water in a structure similar to the bathroom and shower areas one might remember from a high school locker room, explains Mike Klingbiel, the Denver club’s point person for the project.

The structures will also provide safe drinking water at a nominal fee. Currently, people have to trek, sometimes for hours, to the edge of the slum to get water from unregulated businesses, which charge more than eight times what the people who live outside the slum pay, Klingbiel says. At the new facilities, local residents manage the operations at a break-even cost, charging the going meter rate and remitting the money collected to the Nairobi water board.

“People that are poor are having to pay more,” Klingbiel says. “The idea here is to take the money they are usually charged for that water and free it up for education, food, housing, whatever else they can use it for.”

Because the project is in a major metropolitan area, Rotarians had to get the support of many stakeholders, including government officials and agencies, before they could start the project. Klingbiel and the Denver Southeast club wrote up the 3-H grant application and provided some of the administrative expertise, while members of the Nairobi-Langata club provided on-the-ground support, helping with site preparation and coordinating with Ecotact, the Nairobi-based company hired to implement the project.

This was the Nairobi-Langata club’s first project of this magnitude, says past club president Muchau Githiaka, who has been active with the project. “A project of that size has been quite a challenge for us, because it’s the first time we have handled it,” he says. “Now that we have the experience, we can do this in the future with other projects.”

A total of ten of the structures are planned, and the Kenyan government has committed to build an additional four. All 14 are expected to be finished in 2009. Residents have been involved all along – from site selection to construction to management training – so that they can operate and maintain the structures in the future, says David Kuria of Ecotact.

“They are excited,” Kuria says. “Now they have been participating in the whole process.”

And Rotarians hope the initiative will continue. Klingbiel says they have been in talks with other agencies such as USAID that might pick up where they leave off to provide clean water and facilities to the residents of the Kibera slum.

“We’re marrying Rotarians’ passion with their ability to deliver on a project, and then find money outside to finish it,” he says.

Visit the Water and Sanitation Rotarian Action Group.