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Water- and Sanitation Project Cambodia

Hi there!  Koas Kralar School Needs Your Help!

Water- and Sanitation Project Koas Kralar - Cambodia

I’m raising money for Stichting WaterWorks. This foundation is a small non-profit organisation from the Netherlands (which I’m chairwoman off). We support the access to clean drinking water for the financially disadvantaged population in Cambodia. Furthermore, we support schools and their goal for healthy pupils. 

Koas Kralar Secondary & High School, Battambang Province, Cambodia

This school has 913 students in the age of 12 – 22 years and 45 teachers. We want to help them with the access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation.


Context

Koas Kralar has a low yearly rainfall and little access to safe drinking water without paying for it. Due to the lack of rainfall there are many large urns and large pits dug into the ground used to store water.  Many families still currently drink from the rain urns if they cannot afford to buy water and the ground water is used for many things including cooking and bathing. The Highschool also lacks enough bathrooms to host over 900 students and 12 staff that live on campus.   


Through a survey of 33% of the students and all the teachers (held in march 2019) we were shown how much plastic is wasted, school is missed, and how far students must travel to get clean water or if they even have access to clean water. The female population was especially affected because of the lack of sanitation facilities.



We hope to combat all of this through physical intervention with building and approaching it with education to ensure a long-term sustainable project.

Main activities

We aim to establish an infrastructure that will improve access to safe drinking water, reliable restrooms,waste managment, and improving education around sanitation and hygiene.

Goals & Sustainability

Our main goal we would like to achieve is to prevent student absenteeism and to help promote a more comfortable learning environment for all students but especially for female students.  Our secondary goals would focus on a cleaner environment, with trash disposal and increasing knowledge of the benefits of proper hygiene and sanitation.

Short term sustainability:

   Physically speaking, the community waterfilter has been designed to last up to 50 years with the Bio-sand only needing to be replaced every 10 years.  With improved infrastructure to clean water and bathrooms, we hope to see better test scores and a drop in preventable student absences. We are aiming for 70% of students practicing safer techniques by the end of the first year.

  Education based approach, we hope to see a shift towards better choices for proper hygiene at the school including, hand washing and trash disposal.  We will continue to follow up with the education piece throughout the year and hope to see improved home-life sanitation and hygiene practices.

Long term sustainability:

   We would consider this project a success with noticeable increase in female participation at school and a larger population expressing a desire to further their education through post-secondary schooling.

 Through a Community of practice, we will notice an increase in student involvement towards maintaining this healthier lifestyle not only at school but actively educating family members about safer sanitary practices.

History of the foundation

As off 2013 we work in a rural area, Koas Kralar District, Battambang Province, Cambodia. This is a very poor district. They don't have paved roads and in the rainy season it's almost impossible to reach some villages such as Arai. 
The villages don’t have clean drinking water. They drink dirty water from a pond.

Since 2013 our secretary volunteered with different non-governmental organisation in Koas Kralar District. He was startled to see the poverty and to see the children drinking water from the ponds. He decided he wanted to do more for these children. So, he asked family and friends to donate money and he collected some of his savings. He donated and helped building a watertank, waterfilters and latrines in Arai.

In 2015, I went to Arai to see his projects. I became very sad to see the conditions that the children were living in and decided right away I wanted to help too.

We made plans, wrote a policy plan and started up Stichting WaterWorks (a Dutch non-profit foundation) in May 2017.

From then on, we have helped 6 schools to safe drinking water, all in Koas Kralar District. We have built watertanks, watercollection and placed waterfilters at the schools. Also, we build a kitchen for Arai, a classroom for Beng Chneas and donated school supplies, vegetable seeds and sports equipment.

After all these years we have built up a network of local Cambodians who help us with translating, we have a permanent local contractor and we buy from a small local hardware store.

We may say that 97 % of the donated money goes directly to the projects in Cambodia.
3% are management costs used for bank account and website.
The board does NOT receive any fee and pays its stay & travel costs themselves. 

Will you help us keep our efforts moving forward ​in 2020?  Because the biggest gift you can give is Better Health for Children!


For more information:
Website 
Facebook

Organizer

Audrey Beijers
Organizer
Geleen, NL

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