During my internship at a law firm, one of the advocates who was working there told me about how he and a few other individuals, helped fund a program that made water more accessible to a tribal population in Kenya.
Kenya, although adorned with green glory and an infinite supply of food, faces a dearth in accessible water for all the obvious reasons: politics that directs almost all the water to urban facilities, lack of adequate water preservation, and industrial greed. This leaves little drinkable water for the poor population.
These tribes have to walk for miles to reach a small lake where they can access clean water. And in most of these cases, it is the female members who have to walk under the sun to get water for their villages. The practice is quite common in India and other South-East Asian countries as well.
Retrieving water for an entire village takes up almost the whole day for the women and girls of that village; this means that they have little to no time to do anything else. Their mundane routine is to wake up, collect water, do household chores, sleep, and repeat the entire process the next day. They do not get time to go to school for even the most basic education.
The advocate in my law firm helped raise funds for a charity organisation that built a mechanical well in one of the tribal villages in Kenya. The women no longer needed to walk almost six miles for water.
A Christian missionary school operated a mile away from this village where all the boys used to go to get education. Within two years of instalment of the well, the school started getting almost forty per cent attendance of female students.
Making water more accessible to these villages indirectly made education for women and girls easier as well. Opening schools is not enough to increase access to education, we need to make sure that the most eminent demands for the poor like food, water, shelter, health and hygiene facilities are taken care of as well.
- The reader is a student in Dubai