Page 48 - IB August 2024

Water and Sanitation

ADDRESSING KIRIBATI’S ‘ALARMING’

WATER SITUATION

By Kite Pareti

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 with a constitution. We work with the local council in the
development organisations come in, build water tanks, but outer islands, and we work with them to come up with a
they don’t get the behaviour change and the ownership governance structure that they own and run, as well as doing
right,” she said. the training and the maintenance, which is important,” she
“So, it’s not just about training local communities to be added.
able to fix them, maintain them, and so on. It’s about a sense Pagani says ChildFund has a team of 15 on the ground in
of ownership. Where does the water tank go? Is it in the right Kiribati and “we want to train a few as plumbers and water
place? Who decides where it goes? Who decides who gets the
drinkable water and how? So, what we try to do is come up Continued on page 50

48 Islands Business, August 2024