Fetching clean, safe water is now much easier for our primary school – because we have fitted our well with a solar-powered electric pump!
Over the last few years, our primary school installed a rainwater harvesting system and an underground well, thanks to help from our supporters in the UK. Both have helped our school drastically cut its safe water costs.
But the process of fetching water from the underground well was manual; slow and tiring for school staff. A rope was attached to a container and lowered down to fetch water and then pulled out again. Pupils could not go near the deep well as the water-fetching process was too risky for them.
But again supporters have stepped in to help. They understood we needed to improve our access to the water for drinking, hand washing and other hygiene needs – and helped by providing a solar-powered pump, water tower and an extra water tank, to make sure of an adequate supply even when there is no rain.
The pump has been installed by local young electrical engineer Elijah Wakooli (pictured) and this now successfully pumps water into our storage tanks.
The process wasn’t without difficulties… these things conspired to slow things down:
1. Finding the right location for the solar panels – they need to receive sufficient sunlight, (while the well is under trees), safe from either being stolen or having stones thrown at them, and not too far away from the pump.
2. For the pump to have sufficient power to propel the water to the top of our (fairly tall) building requires 0.75 inch water pipes, but our existing water pipes within our building were 0.5 inch pipes.
3. The place where one of the water tanks was to stand was invaded by a swarm of bees, which we could not get rid of for two weeks!