Our Work » Community Schemes » Safe Water Scheme
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Clean water is essential for life, but over a billion people (a sixth of the world's population) do not have access to safe drinking water. It is estimated that a child dies every 15 seconds in developing countries as a result of diseases related to a lack of safe water.
As well as disease and death, a lack of clean water close to people's homes also affects their time, livelihood and quality of life. Women and children especially often spend hours in a daily ritual, walking many miles just to collect water. More often than not, even this water is dirty and unsafe, but there is no alternative.
There are social repercussions too. Carrying heavy water containers is an exhausting task, which consumes valuable time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere. It prevents women from doing vital domestic or income generating work and often stops children from going to school, therefore perpetuating the poverty cycle.
In a very real sense therefore, the universal provision of easily accessible, safe, clean water is one of the biggest and most important challenges facing the world today. The response from developed nations, however, has been less than overwhelming.
MH Safe Water Schemes
For many years now, the provision of safe water has been a key goal for Muslim Hands and an important consideration in all our work. Initially our work focused on addressing individual's needs through small wells, piping systems and hand pumps to extract water from underground water tables. Whilst this work continues where appropriate, a much larger emphasis is now placed on schemes that address community problems -- almost without fail it's not just the individual who lacks access to clean water, it's his or her community also.
Of course, as well as providing individuals with clean water, an important aspect of tackling the safe water problem is to educate individuals about the dangers of unsafe water, especially for the very young and elderly, and how to responsibly manage whatever water is available, whether naturally occurring or held in reservoirs.
Muslim Hands safe water projects focus on a number of key areas:
Clean Water Provision
The first priority is to ensure that individuals and communities have access to clean and safe water for drinking, cooking and other domestic uses. The method used to source water varies with location and can include:
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Tube Wells
These are small manually operated pumps that can be used to extract water located in water tables relatively close to the surface, but that would otherwise be inaccessible. Filters can be fitted to the bottom of tube wells in areas where the underground water is unclean or has been contaminated. -
Motorised Pumps
These are used in locations where underground water is present, but is much deeper down. An advantage of motorised pumps is that they are able to draw up more water; the disadvantage is they need a power source such as electricity or diesel. -
Storage and Filtration
Sometimes water is present in an area, either all the time or at certain periods during the year. Schemes to capture or store water include tanks, underground reservoirs and mini dams. Often such collected water is not clean and must pass through a filtration unit before use. -
Transportation
Some inhabited regions simply do not have enough accessible water. In this case water can be transported in tankers and stored in underground reservoirs built for this purpose. Occasionally pipes can be built to carry water to more arid regions from a distant water source.
Clockwise: Tube Well (Afghanistan), Motorised Pump (Pakistan), Storage and Filtration (Iraq) and Tanker Transportation (Sudan)
Sanitation
As well as the provision of water, Muslim Hands schemes tackle the highly related problem of sanitation. Often alongside the installation of a well or other scheme latrines with a suitable capacity will be built. Individuals in a community are also educated about the importance of domestic sanitation and ensuring latrines are placed far away from water sources.
Education
Several Muslim Hands projects have involved supplying a health worker to a region to provide education about the importance of clean water and sanitation and how to spot and treat illness that may arise from the consumption of unsafe water.