Clean drinking water for Sierra Leone
Many children in Sierra Leone don't live beyond the age of five. The cause of death is often contaminated ground and drinking water. Clean water is, in other words, vitally important. Zebra built a water treatment plant in Yele that turns river water into drinking water. Two villages in the region are now seeing their child mortality rates drop.
Sierra Leone is one of the world's least developed countries, and poverty is everywhere. The inland especially suffers from a lack of safe drinking water. The new water treatment facility today provides 4,000 people with just that. Water from the facility is kept in a specially built, 120 cubic meter water tower - enough to supply the two villages with enough water to last two days.
Straight from the faucet
To bring the water from the tower to the villages, Zebra built extensive and sturdy waterworks. most inhabitants have no toilet, kitchen or shower which would have made direct household connections to the waterworks an expensive affair. Instead, faucets have been installed at key places in the villages: the police office, the school and the new hospital each have their own tap.
Sponsors wanted
We've sought out sponsors to help finance the project and found the German government and the Lion Heart Foundation among those willing. The latter is already involved with us in the hospital in Yele, which is also served well by the new waterworks. Lion Heart also commissioned Zebra for the hydroelectric plant, to generate power. In the drinking water project, roles are reversed, with Zebra spearheading the project and Lion Heart in partnership.
The future
Today, the village of Yele has power, drinking water and a hospital. Ideas run wild for the future. For instance, Zebra has embraced the idea together with the Lion Heart Foundation to build a refrigeration facility to store food in. Fish, caught at the coast, hardly reaches the inland these days because there isn't anything to keep it fresh. A refrigeration house would fill that void. Ideas aplenty for Yele - we've been working here for four years and we're not ready to leave just yet!
