In Kiribati, many people still struggle to get adequate access to safe, clean drinking water. But work is well underway to try and ensure more schools can provide this basic human need to students.
“If you don’t have access to clean water, your chances of getting a good education or a good set of skills to get a job are so diminished,” says Josie Pagani, Chief Executive Officer of ChildFund New Zealand.
Since 2016, the international charity and local non-government organisations such as Green Living, have been providing water distillation units in schools and villages in South Tarawa and surrounding areas.
“The way that we decide where to work is very much driven by local communities. We go to the hard places, the remote places that other people don’t go to. And the way that we approach the work is to be guided by our strategic goal, which really is to remove whatever the barriers are to children and young peoples’ learning and getting the opportunities that they need,” says Pagani.
Recent studies have shown that one in ten deaths of children under five years old is linked to diarrhoea in parts of the Pacific and just 27% of households have access to safe, clean drinking water in Kiribati. Pagani says this is “alarming”.
“We know that not much has changed in five years, there has been some progress, but not enough,” she said. “These problems are very fixable,” she added.
ChildFund has been rolling out Solvatten, a type of water distillation unit, to about 10,000 people in Kiribati.
“They’re like jerry cans and they’re quite narrow. You open them up like a book and you fill them with water and you just put them in the sun. That’s it. And it has a sad smiley face that’s red. And when the sad face goes green and smiles, it’s a smiley face, [it means] the water is clean.”
“As long as the sun is shining, you’ll be able to get 10 litres of drinkable water within a couple of hours. It’s a very, very simple unit. They’re [Solvatten] pretty amazing for a family that doesn’t have access to clean water,” she added.
While the technology promises to last about 10 years, what is even more important is giving locals a sense of ownership of the tools provided, says Pagani.
“Kiribati is littered with well-intentioned infrastructure that doesn’t work anymore and part of the problem is that development organisations come in, build water tanks, but they don’t get the behaviour change and the ownership right,” she said.
“So, it’s not just about training local communities to be able to fix them, maintain them, and so on. It’s about a sense of ownership. Where does the water tank go? Is it in the right place? Who decides where it goes? Who decides who gets the drinkable water and how? So, what we try to do is come up with a constitution. We work with the local council in the outer islands, and we work with them to come up with a governance structure that they own and run, as well as doing the training and the maintenance, which is important,” she added.
Pagani says ChildFund has a team of 15 on the ground in Kiribati and “we want to train a few as plumbers and water technicians… So they can go out and train the uncles and aunties out in the islands.”
In Tuvalu, French water company, Suez Pacific, has been training locals to maintain the desalination units provided by them in recent years.
Suez Pacific’s General Manager, Marc Mocellin, says the training is critical and “we are comfortable to say that Tuvaluan people are managing their desalination units well as we collaborate with them”.
He says three new desalination units are being installed in Tuvalu in September.
Mocellin says Suez is looking into the possibility of installing Starlink satellite technology in a few months on each of their units. “This way we can communicate and have access to all the data from the desalination units. It is very valuable,” he said.
