Child Safety Fund – Preventing Child Sacrifice

 To Construct Boreholes Help Prevent Child Sacrifice

By Shadrak Kyobe, Director, EACO Uganda

In rural Mukono children and women travel miles each day to collect water for their families. It’s dangerous and debilitating.

Children are kept out of school so that they can perform this and other associated household tasks.

While walking long distances to collect water, children are vulneralbe to kidnapping and sacrifice, more so in Mukono and this happens when they travel to collect water to very far wells deep in the forests. These boreholes provide water closer to the town centre, so women and children do not have to travel far to fetch water, and are therefore safer from kidnapping and sacrifice

EACO with support from ‘Just a Drop’ has protected and improved the life of these people and two boreholes have been drilled and our target is to drill 40 bore holes which are deep.

Not only has the health of the community improved a lot but it has saved so much time for those carrying water.

Women’s Economic Empowerment

The women can now spend more time in productive work and the children can attend school more.

The supply of local clean water has increased revenue raising initiatives, especially brick-making, so the community has more money to spend on other important things.

Local Clean Water Changes Lives

These people have high rates of malnourishment. Local clean water supplies lead to increasing levels of school attendance (especially amongst girls), high rates of disease (especially malaria), and numerous other problems linked to severe poverty and an exceptionally low standard of living. The creation of a borehole well will put a clean, sustainable source of water in close to approximately 3,000 households.  The goal of this project is to put in borehole wells in five sub-counties. We believe that through your help, we can transform their lives.

Our target is to drill 40 bore holes within the community of rural Mukono but already 2 boreholes have been drilled in the community of Namanganga and Lugari.

Latrines and Wash Facilities Improve Health

Most of our beneficiaries (households and schools) do not have latrines and wash facilites. This forces them to dig a hole up to on foot deep to ease themselves, close to their homes.

These holes are dug in the gardens where they grow their food which is risky.

Some dig beside their houses and it scares us about their health and sanitation when it happens to rain. We see that this causes diarrhorea because flies get onto food, and anything being set for eating and, even more, these people do not have a habit of washing their hands after easing themselves and just walk straight to have something to eat; which puts their life at risk.

Further still, these people get jiggers and ringworms in their feet and the legs. This also affects the animals they keep in their homes which often call for de-worming and these beneficiaries do not have the money to be out of this problem to look for treatment.

• £10 will bring safe drinking water to one person
• £25 will train the clients on hygiene and sanitation
•  £50 will buy a pipe for construction of a borehole
  
• £90 will buy construction materials for a borehole
• £1,200 will build a latrine for one home.
• £2,500 will build a latrine for 100 pupils in a school.
• £8.000 will drill a deep borehole with the under ground tank. This will serve 3,000 people in the one of the communities of Mukono.

EACO provides physical and psychosocial support to marginalized groups of people living in Mukono district. The organisation empowers them through economic development, which it achieves through education programs, vocational training, and the provision of health care.