Helping communities gain access to clean drinking water and healthcare.
Primary Healthcare Centers
Despite vast advances made in medicine over the past decades, many communities in rural Africa still do not have access to medical facilities and primary healthcare. Various factors such as poverty, malnutrition and unemployment all contribute to ill health. Africa Foundation assists by facilitating the building of clinics and accommodations for staff and the upgrading of existing, but inadequate, primary healthcare clinics. In most of the communities Africa Foundation supports, there are government clinics which attempt to provide for the local people, but they are woefully under-equipped, lacking in resources and poorly maintained. Africa Foundation is committed to ensuring that better facilities are put in place.
Clean Water - At the Heart of Healthy Communities
One of the worst daily hardships faced by many African rural communities is the extreme shortage of water. Rural women and children often walk more than a kilometer every day to fetch water, returning home stooped under the backbreaking burden of their full water buckets, sometimes repeating this trip several times per day. When children are required to spend a large part of their day gathering water, the task affects all aspects of their youth, especially time spent on education and physical development.
Water Tanks and Rainwater Harvesting
Africa Foundation has provided guttering and rainwater tanks, taps, water pumps and windmills, affording numerous communities access to drinking water. Rainwater harvesting has long been recognized as a viable and cost-effective means of accessing water for rural communities. Africa Foundation has been instrumental in the installation of approximately 30 water tanks and guttering in many communities. Water tanks raise awareness of the benefits of water collection in communities and individual households. The tanks provide water for school children, who do not have to miss school because they have to fetch water. Water tanks are sustainable and have a long life span.
Borehole Drilling
Africa Foundation has provided communities with borehole drilling and pump facilities creating clean water sources for thousands of people.
Hippo Water Rollers
Hippo Water Rollers bring immediate relief to the water scarcity and transportation problems faced by so many rural communities. The innovative design of the Hippo Water Roller (like an old-fashioned drum lawn roller) makes the task of collecting water much easier, and far less time-consuming. The Rollers have a 90-liter capacity – a great improvement on the usual 5-liter containers carried on the head. To date, more than 7,000 Hippo Water Rollers have been distributed.
