Abstract
One of the targets for the Millennium Development Goals is to half the proportion of the population without adequate access to safe drinking water. Despite investments from governments, private companies, and NGOs, many water projects fail to meet their goals because of the social-political context in which they are implemented. More specifically, projects fail to consider how communities relate to water resources socially, politically, economically and spiritually. Since 2006, I have been working with a village in the rural highlands of semi-arid East Africa as part of my dissertation, understanding how people protect, manage and utilize their limited water resources. Village leaders protect existing water supplies through traditional practices, but village expansion has increased access to additional water supplies that are not protected by village leaders. Population growth has stretched finite water supplies and the village needs the technology and funding to improve the supply of clean water. I propose to utilize a combination of social and physical methods, building on existing behaviors, to protect water source quality and improve the reliable supply of clean water. To accomplish this I need to build livestock troughs to keep animals away from the water supply and adapt existing slow-sand filtration technologies to improve water quality for human consumption. Improved distribution of water supplies for various uses, such as clothes washing and bathing will be incorporated into the design.
