A Message to Friendly Soap Customers
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With vaccine roll-outs years away from reaching all the communities we serve; hand hygiene has become their first line of defence against the pandemic.
Thanks to your support, Just a Drop has been able to continue its vital work, bringing safe water, sanitation and hygiene training to communities across Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, Cambodia, India and Nicaragua, helping curb the spread of COVID-19.
So thank you, Friendly Soap supporter, because with every purchase you make, you are helping Just a Drop make an impact in the lives of thousands of people across the world.
Hygiene Training in Schools
With the support of amazing partners like Friendly Soap, Just a Drop has been able to continue its work throughout the pandemic; helping communities across Kenya to build rain water harvesting tanks in their local schools. As part of our holistic approach, we also facilitated hygiene and sanitation training in the schools, known as WASH training. One such element of the WASH training is learning how to make your own soap, ensuring that the school will always have soap to keep hygiene standards high, and its pupils will always have a sustainable supply of soap to wash their hands. By using a range of games and roleplay exercises, the children learn also learn about personal hygiene and how to most effectively use the hand-washing stations installed at the school by Just a Drop.
In addition, Health Clubs are established at each school; a group of students who champion hygiene within their school. This, along with soap-making training ensures the longevity of the skills and knowledge acquired from the WASH training, increasing sanitation standards and helping protect the schools against COVID-19.
Mukai, a 17-year-old student shared her thoughts on how she expected the training to impact their lives:
“This will be a very helpful training not only to us but to the entire community where we come from. Water borne diseases will reduce because now we have a know-how on controlling them. We have not been washing our hands with soap but from today henceforth, we will utilise the knowledge gained and ensure that we wash our hands with clean water and soap. The knowledge gained will help us make soap throughout to ensure that there’s enough soap to clean our latrines, classes, utensils and especially for washing hands.”
Food Security
Water insecurity doesn’t just mean not having water to drink. With every Friendly Soap purchase, you enable Just a Drop to not only bring access to safe water and reduce water insecurity, your support also enables Just a Drop to help farmers sustain their livelihoods and put food on the table.
Before Just a Drop started working in Kilanga village, Kenya, farmers were struggling to reliably grow crops during the non-rainy season. Water, and the lack of it, has profound implications for food.
As well as the water-related illnesses the community was suffering from due to dirty water, a lack of food increases the prevalence of malnutrition, adding further burdens to a community already struggling. Further, being unable to grow crops due to lack of water also decreases the community’s self-sufficiency, as it means they become dependent on food relief.
Our work has positive ripples for every member of the community we serve. During this project we also trained the community in: how to grow drought-resistant crops; using crops sustainably; maintaining a seed bank; governance training when selling excess crops, and terracing to prevent water loss and soil erosion - providing the knowledge, tools and seeds to get them started.
What’s more, 1,279 trees were planted by the community members, meaning the project has the continued wider benefit of helping to mitigate climate change.
One of the farmers commented:
“Availability of water from these projects has played a huge role in improving our living standards. A lot of energy and time that was initially spent on fetching water is now channeled towards generating income, improving our livelihoods and personal development”
Safe Water Changes Lives
At Just a Drop, we believe that everyone, everywhere deserves clean, safe water as a basic human right. With each Friendly Soap purchase, you are helping us realise this vision, one drop at a time.
Before Just a Drop started working in Raksha’s village in India, she used to walk up to 2km to the village’s closest water source to fetch water. The hand-pumps were overburdened by many waiting in line to collect water. This menial task often fall on women and girls, they would wait for one to two hours at a time to fetch only three buckets of water. But now, Raksha has safe, running water in their homes. They are able to play and attend school, getting the education all girls and boys deserve!
“We are very happy to have water in our house. Now in our school also there is water. We have never seen water running from the taps. We had our own pots [with] our own name on which we used to carry water from hand-pumps. Sometimes we used to arrive at school late as had to carry water for us. Now we play with running water, take bath in our house, wash hands & clothes regularly.”