Next Stop: Nchelenge!

Since I left Lusaka last Tuesday, I have been staying in Mansa, a small city in Luapala Province, with Olivia (another JF) and Trevor (an EWB long term volunteer). Ashley, my coach and also long term volunteer, joined us on Thursday and since then I have learned a bit more about my placement and the role that I could play this summer within DAPP (my partner organisation)! Joie!

So what is that project that I am so excited about?

First of all, the project is related to Water and Sanitation and is called Self Supply. After successes in Zimbabwe and Uganda, Zambia is now taking on a pilot project to test the Self Supply approach for the first time! The pilot project is being runned in four districts: Nchelenge, Chienge, Mansa and Milenge. UNICEF is funding this pilot project and two NGOs are implementing it: DAPP and WaterAid. I will be working with DAPP in Nchelenge while Ashley will be working closely with WaterAid for the next months and reporting back to UNICEF. Both Ashley and myself will work on maximizing the communication between the two implementing organisations to ensure that the lessons learned can be shared between them. Since UNICEF has a limited number of staff in Lusaka working on Water and Sanitation projects, there is no direct connection with the field. Therefore, we will also be working on optimizing the communication between UNICEF and the two organisations to make sure that they are clearly understanding the Self Supply approach.

Self Supply?

This approach is aimed to encourage households and communities to take their own initiatives to upgrade their traditional well. Self Supply does not have one perfect model of well for people to replicate. Also, Self Supply is not providing subsidies to people. Households are the ones who decide what improvements they want and what they can afford to make them happen.
For Self Supply to work, we need to make sure that skilled labour is available in the community, required equipments are accessible, low cost technologies options are introduced, financial systems are established to open this approach to a wide range of people and policies are developed to encourage small-scale initiatives.

These are all assumptions that we are making in order to further assume that with all the enabling factors mentioned, households will participate in the project and that if they do, the quality of the water that they are consuming will improve.

My work in the next months will be to first find ways or improve the existing tools to collect information from the targeted communities in order to best test the assumptions discussed above. For me to better understand the process, I will have an hands-on experience this week by going to Chienge District with a DAPP representative and doing baseline surveys within the district and analyse the results. I am also planning on attending some Village Action Group Meetings (VAG is a group formed by representatives of each household involved in the project) to observe and understand how Self Supply is promoted. Once the information from all the districts will be collected and that we will be satisfied with them, we will develop a social marketing strategy to help DAPP getting more households to participate in the project.

I am very excited to take part in this project and I wished Nchelenge had some Internet connection for me to share with you the development of the Self Supply project! So my next update will probably not be before July when I will come down for the Junior Fellowship retreat. Until then, shaaleenipo! (stay well! ... haha well - as in water well... !)

Nchelenge is right beside the Lake Mweru that is shared with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With some luck, I might be able to find other French speakers in the area!