We are now in week 7 of our project in Sierra Leone and have passed the halfway point! We have reached several milestones, and the biggest milestone is coming up soon. We spent the first month of the project researching the cause of the broken pumps. This often came down to a lack of knowledge and responsibility among the users. The pump is designed for a user group of up to 50 people, with one family responsible for it. However, many of our pumps were installed at schools where sometimes more than 1000 children were around.
Next, we spoke with two experts who told us that the pumps were installed on the wrong wells. The open wells make the pump very susceptible to damage, so we are now setting up a pilot where we will install the pump on a borehole. Our pump is designed for this purpose.
Additionally, there is a training center in Freetown focused on manually making boreholes where we plan to train two engineers from SEP-SL.
The pilot is planned soon, and if it is successful, SEP will have all the resources at hand to expand this project further, resulting in many more satisfied users and helping more people access safe drinking water.
