Power in Partnerships: Save the Children helps in Cite Soleil
As a result of the devastation of the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Save the Children (SAVE) and Pure Water for the World (PWW) entered into an agreement to provide emergency water delivery to sites in Port-au-Prince, hygiene education training and hygiene promotion – primarily to Cite Soleil. This area of Port au Prince is considered one of the world’s poorest and has suffered extensive damage from the earthquake.
This partnership is providing families in the delivery areas with clean water for drinking, cooking and maintaining personal hygiene. It has trained 50 teachers and principals (who had previously participated in the PWW schools’ program) as neighborhood health promoters. The Health Promoters have received additional training to provide hygiene information to five thousand families in Cite Soleil. These teachers and principals are considered community leaders and live and work in Cite Soleil.
Because 90% of the reservoirs in schools where PWW previously had filter programs were damaged and unusable, the identification of usable sites was imperative. In a few weeks, more than 40 sites were selected. PWW is now delivering five liters of chlorinated water to 82,000 people per day – 60% are children. The majority of these delivery sites are in Cite Soleil with the remainder in the Fort National and Delmas areas of Port au Prince. Delivering water six days per week in the first month of the project, PWW delivered 520 tanker loads of water totaling 1,612,000 gallons of water.
“Pure Water for the World has become a lifeline for the people of Cite Soleil, especially when they needed it the most. In these areas where water is a scarce commodity, people need continuing support. Pure Water has been able to access unsecured sections of Cite Soleil and gained the acceptance of its community. Save the Children appreciates partnering with the PWW-Haiti project and looks forward to exploring avenues continuing our support of the children and their caregivers in Haiti,” said Donald Burgess of Save the Children in Haiti.
