The following post was written by Sherwood’s Michael Thornton, currently based in Ddegeya, Uganda.

For the next three weeks I’ll be reporting from here as I continue my work with the MIT chapter of Engineers Without Borders.  We’re here in Ddegeya in the second year of a five year project to enhance the quality of life of this rural village of about 1,000 through enhancements to the village’s water and power infrastructure.

The MIT EWB chapter (check out their blog HERE) has done an amazing job assessing the base conditions, researching solutions, gathering stakeholder input and planning designs.  The purpose of this trip is to implementation; in this case meaning installing a 1.4 kW solar system, testing and fixing boreholes and testing homemade sand filters and the flocculation capacity of a local seed from the meringe tree.  This is my second trip to Ddegeya; last summer with the Sherwood Institute’s backing I spent three weeks here performing a pre-site site analysis review of the village, its resources and environment.  For those interested, I’d be happy to send around the report from this visit.  This trip finds me with a team of six members of the MIT EWB chapter as their trip mentor; basically an in-field professional responsible for overseeing all works.

In a later post I’ll go into more detail about the work we are doing.  First, some background:  Ddegeya is a rural village in south central Uganda, in the Masaka province.  As you can see from the photos it is minimally developed and has a warm, dry climate.  Uganda is one of the poorest nations in the world; its total GDP is equal to approximately 2-3 quarters of Apple’s revenue.  Located a few miles from the equator, its seasonality is dominated by wet and dry cycles; its elevation (average 1206 meters in Kampala) keeps it relatively cool despite its equatorial location.  Despite its poverty, it’s also a beautiful country with amazing people and a relatively stale government and rapidly developing infrastructure.  Helping development here is helping the whole of Africa.

I am staying at, and much of our work is centered around, the Engeye health clinic a level two health center that is unable to offer many basic services due to lack of refrigeration and steady clean water.  Part of EWB MIT’s goal is to solve these issues.

Presently there is no legal electricity in the village (one or two stores have tapped a transmission line for soda boxes) and water comes from a single shallow borehole and pond, seen below.  The water from the borehole (fixed during my summer visit last year) is relatively clean, though insecure at only 20’ depth.  The water from the pond is filthy and a regular disease vector, as water is in much of Uganda.  The community sometimes boils water; sometimes does not.  In addition to suffering from water born illnesses, many members of the community must walk miles to the borehole; taking valuable time and energy from their days and practically limiting the amount of water available to each family.  Daily per capita water consumption is somewhere around 15 liters.  Finding and developing more distributed, cleaner sources is of primary importance to the development of Ddegeya.

In the next post I’ll explore Uganda’s overall water / power situation and in the final post will provide more detail about the works we’ll have hopefully completed and the outlook moving forward.  So stay tuned, and please post any questions you may have and I’ll do my best to answer!

Tags: Engineers Without Borders, MIT, Uganda
Posted in Development, Water management | No Comments »