KenyaConnections

Our Problem. The vast majority of the 110,000 residents of Khwisero, a rural district in Western Kenya, live below Kenya’s rural poverty line making access to improved sanitation and clean water extremely rare. Traditional pit latrines and contaminated water supplies either claim or profoundly detract from the quality of lives of thousands of residents in Western Kenya every year. Primary School-age children are disproportionately affected by inadequate sanitation and contaminated water. When sick, these children are either absent from school or underperform in the classroom, resulting in low test-scores and the missed opportunity to fully actualize their education. Poor water access disproportionately affects girls, as well. As a result of their gender roles as “water carriers,” female students realize less class time than their male peers.

Our Solution. By addressing the source of water contamination—pit latrines—and providing access to clean water through deep water bore holes, EWB-MSU address Khwisero’s water and sanitation issue holistically. With local participation, EWB-MSU’s project design fuses local materials and practices with Western methods to establish a system that is technologically, economically, and culturally sustainable. Through the utilization of educational support, EWB-MSU is able to supplement local knowledge of the links between water, sanitation and disease. The relationship between these practices—the provision of material support with projects and immaterial education—is wholly interdependent and is necessary to ensure project sustainability.

Our Results. To date, 3,500 Kenyan students have been directly benefitted in gaining direct access to clean water and sanitation facilities, while 8,000 community members surrounding Khwisero’s 58 primary schools have been indirectly affected by EWB-MSU’s work. Of the 3,500 students affected, approximately half are girls, who otherwise would lose an average of 2 hours of class-time per day collecting water; each affected girl realizes up to 380 more hours of class-time annually.

Our Organization. Now in its seventh year, EWB-MSU has worked to become a model organization which demonstrates a new paradigm of student-driven international development by creating, implementing and analyzing mechanisms to ensure sustainability. We have defined “sustainability” in our international project work by undertaking a multi-disciplined approach in our operations and extensive community involvement through partnerships with primary schools and communities. Similarly, we have added meaning to the term “sustainability” in Bozeman by mentoring underclassmen and ensuring that young, remarkably competent students undertake leadership roles in the organization. The result has been award-winning films, sold-out events and fundraisers, sociological surveys, radio interviews and academic papers, all in addition to sustainable engineering projects in Khwisero.