In January 2020 our Water for Cambodia team conducted a survey of our three 2018 Villages and our 2020 target villages.
They discovered three factors which could influence our planned implementation:
1-Political changes in the county had held up the Village Chiefs from being paid regularly…would this be a detriment? We were pleased that the trust we had established in past years held up but we were concerned.
2-Three or four of the Chiefs had taken up water delivery from village ponds to individual households…our main contact person could consider our wells to be his competition. A couple of temporary long faces until the scope and limits of the project were understood. Kudos to Samley for his tact!
3-Again, we have been reminded what well-meaning but poorly conceived “economic empowerment” looks like in the field.
For the second time in 5 years the villagers have been subject to the sales tactics of city boys selling them latrine kits not one of which was installed during my 2015 community assessment. This last year the residents were stormed by the pottery water filter brigade. Commissioned salespeople!
Forty dollars, in most cases financed, for a filter that has a low yield, clogs up on the turbid source water and is not fond of rough handling. Our January survey team determined anecdotally that roughly half were still in use. One village Chief told me 20 out of 30 in his village were “broken”, which I interpreted as not in use. And for this they paid nearly a month’s wages
I know the names of all the charities, foundations, government agencies and the bank involved in this “empowerment” but water can sometimes be a dirty business.
“WASH programs too frequently fail to bring sustainable benefits to the people they seek to serve, with as much as 30-50% of WASH projects failing after two to five years.” (UNDP Water Governance Facility/UNICEF (2015) “WASH and Accountability: Explaining the Concept”)
Getting Water Right does it the hard way, holistically…and it works. We were disappointed in our 90% success rate.