Senegal Water Project Alleviates Burden on Women
Senegal Support
Food Security for Senegal
Join ActionAid's efforts to ensure Senegal's poor have access to clean water and food.
Donate Now
Securing clean drinking water remains a daily challenge for Senegalese women working to provide for their families.
Women living in rural areas often wake up at 5 a.m. to begin a hiking down a hill to collect water from a dribbling stream before tracking their collection back up a steep hill to their village.
"Access to water, fetching water is a big problem for women," explained ActionAid's Senegal Country Director Moussa Faye. "Women spend hours collecting 20-30 liters from small stream where water is dripping. I tried to do it and I almost collapsed. But, women do it every day.”
A woman in Senegal uses the community's reservoir to collect water for her family.
To help alleviate the burden on women and provide rural villages with sanitary water to drink, ActionAid partnered with RAIN --an international organization focused on increasing access to water for vulnerable sections of society -- on a water harvesting project. By working with communities, we have built 50 reservoirs for villages and schools in poor Senegal communities over the past two years. The program has also installed metal hangers on roofs to collect rain water that once simply streamed down the hills.
Simply providing women with easy access to clean water means they have more time to spend with their children, attending to household chores and working. And, the clean water means fewer diseases for rural villages.
Join ActionAid and its efforts to provide clean water to poor communities.