We as Khulumani Water for Dignity, have been working with disadvantaged communities who struggle to access water. This is the situation that constantly affects residents of Makana Municipality. From STATSSA figures, we see that our population has grown from 75,000 to 120,000 between 2010 and 2015 and this has caused complex challenges in respect of the situation of access to water.
We have tried to remedy the situation by installing tanks in our community with an initiative called One Street One Tank which tries to assist communities in Grahamstown East. The Hippo Water Rollers arrived at the time we have been focusing on the community of Vukani, an RDP housing settlement. We had done household water access surveys in Vukani township. The results of our surveys showed that we should use the Hippo Water Rollers to assist Vukani residents who are affected by repeated water outages.
We learned from our surveys that the people most affected are older persons and we decided to set up a water stokvel to provide deliveries of water to pensioners who are 200 metres or more from sites of water access such as water tanks. We decided to implement community water forums where we shared our thinking about setting up water stokvels. We expected that this would encourage our community to learn the power of sharing access to water using a water emergency barrel system (WEBS). Those who are able to invest in purchasing the water barrels are then serviced by water deliveries from the Hippo Water Rollers.
Our vision of WEBS is to facilitate the development of respect for the right to water and our shared responsibility to ensure that all people have access to water. WEBS is a development of the One Street one Tank project which provides emergency water provision through a system of water tanks that have been delivered to certain sites in the community where people take initiatives to safeguard the tanks and learn how to do water quality testing.
With support from other stakeholders each tank is associated with a Wall of Hope which serves as a way of build relationships in the community and stimulating investments through offering wall space for branding for a fee on the Walls of Hope.
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KHULUMANI THANKS THE HIPPO WATER ROLLER PROJECT FOR THEIR DONATION FOR ITS WORK IN MAKANA MUNICIPALITY
Khulumani Water for Dignity ran a small crowdfunding campaign on the website hipporoller.org to fundraise for Hippo Water Rollers. (Campaign Link: http://www.hipporoller.org/projects/one-street-one-tank-grahamstown/). The Hippo rollers are used in Water for Dignity’s work to deal with the impacts of the recurrent water outages in Garahamstown and in particular in Grahamstown schools where Khulumani has launched a new project called G.E.M.D.S – the acronym for Grahamstown East Makana Dignified Schools. The use of the water rollers have been linked into this initiative which is being driven by Mr Mbulalo Lipile who can be contacted on .
