Partnerships in Haiti
Unprecedented private partnership with USAID project to bring new health and learning prospects for Haiti’s deprived children.
Access to safe water is defined as an important component of the USAID latest public health project in Haiti, aimed at reaching nearly 50% of Haiti’s 8 million population with quality health care through a large network of 152 NGO-run and public sites.
Carolyn Crowley Meub, executive director of the nonprofit organization Pure Water for the World, Inc. (PWW), on her part, recalls what a woman once told her: Clean water is medicine; further adding, We cannot be healthy if we do not have access to safe drinking water.
Both approaches made for an unprecedented merger of efforts on behalf of Haiti’s children, in the form of a public-private partnership agreement signed on December 15, 2007, at the conclusion of an international water summit convened by the Rotary Club of Ption-Ville.
To help maintain good health and reduce water induced illnesses like diarrhea children’s number one killer in the country the project initial 12 months aim to first equip 450 schools and orphanages, [In Haiti] We will be reaching 200,000 children by providing filters through the schools as well as funding programs to teach sanitation and hygiene said Carolyn Meub at a Rotary fundraising in Glen Falls, New-York. Further, 41 health facilities and 150 homes in impoverished areas of 23 communes of the West, South and Grande-Anse (Southwest) departments of the country will benefit the use of water filter systems.
To complement the innovative technology equipment, over 800 animators including 30 technicians trained and certified will ensure correct utilization of the filters by their community beneficiaries. Students, their teachers and communities will become more knowledgeable about hygiene and sanitation.
The program using bio-sand filters was developed by US retired businessman and eminent honor-recipient Rotarian Charles Adams who has largely contributed to the cause of water quality issues in 3rd world nations. Adams represents a great asset for the USAID-PWW partnership program, which he is directing in person from Port-au-Prince, after leading realization of its successful model in Latin America like in Honduras.
Indeed, the simple to use bio-sand filters, main equipment of the project, of low construction costs and sturdiness, come with proven results of removing 100% parasites and 95% bacteria in common water. The filters have no moving parts and require no electricity explains Meub.
The ongoing construction of those filters using local material is providing new skills to locals in the area of the first selected schools to benefit from their installation at start of the next 2008 – 2009 school year. On the production site, skilled workers fabricate six filters a day, having reached well over 200 of them before the end of the current school year.
The USAID/PWW partnership, reaching local organizations in needy areas schools, health clinics and households, aims to save kids’ lives and conveys the goal of USAID’s project to ensure stronger communities working for their own development and bringing stability to the Caribbean nation.
USAID-Pwoj Djanm 3-year public health project and Pure Water for the World have formally engaged in a unique partnership with objective of bringing safe water innovative technology (using slow sand filtration process) to about 200,000 schoolchildren and school personnel, 41 health facilities and over 120 households in impoverished ommunities during its first year of execution.
