Imagine walking 40 laps around a track to fetch clean water.
During Kenya’s dry season, students at Ogiek Kwaanza Secondary School travel six to eight kilometers to do just that — a routine that disrupts class time. The school faces a high dropout rate due to the dangers students may face on these walks.
This past summer, four members of the Boston University chapter of Engineers Without Borders — Clara Armon, Chaney Finkeldei, Urvi Chakravarthy and Omar Elhussini — worked with the school, located in Tinet, Kenya, to help make clean water more accessible.
“Our mission is to provide humanitarian engineering solutions to underserved communities around the world and also to gain hands-on engineering experience,” said Finkeldei, president of EWBBU.
She said their plan for this project was to build a borehole well, which is drilled deep into the ground to access the water table for a permanent clean water source.
This water, some of which has been there for centuries, originates from rain that has seeped into the ground. The water is then filtered through layers of rock and naturally cleaned as it travels downward.
Deeper, older water does not carry contaminants from agricultural and chemical waste, which Finkeldei added makes it even cleaner.
However, even upon implementing the borehole well, the project was not complete — this was just the second of three phases.
The idea for this project arose seven years ago when EWB USA received a story from an Ogiek man named Franklyn. The BU team reached out to him offering to help his community, and he remains their community contact to this day.
Chakravarthy, the international lead of EWBBU, said the team specifically chose to work with the Ogiek due to their long history of being evicted from their own land by the Kenyan government.
For hundreds of years, the Ogiek people have resided deep in Kenya’s Mau Forest, relying on its harvest for food and medicine and its beehives to produce honey.
However, as industrial agriculture began to tear through their land — forcing them to the outskirts of the forest — much of their livelihoods were destroyed. The Ogiek succeeded in getting their rights recognized, but the damage had already been done.
“Around 2013, the Ogiek people won a historic battle against the Kenyan government and got their rights back to the forest,” Chakravarthy said. “Ever since, because of all of this constant relocation and political issues, they’ve been really struggling with access to clean water.”
The project officially began two years ago with the assessment phase, in which two team members, along with another student and professor, surveyed the community on issues relating to the Ogiek people’s access to water, Finkeldei said.
Now that both the assessment and implementation phases have been completed, the team plans on returning next year to add a pump and filtration system, which would allow users of the well to bring the water up to the surface.
Once the system is fully operational, the team intends to take another trip for a monitoring phase, where they would observe the well’s functionality to see whether it meets all of their objectives.
“The goal is always to hand off the projects to the community,” Finkeldei said. “[We aim to] set up an infrastructure where they can maintain all of the projects.”
However, one major issue persists throughout the entire initiative: funding.
Elhussini, treasurer of the EWBBU, said although their advisor and other BU faculty members are helpful in connecting them with donors, they are unable to rely only on them to fund their projects.
For this reason, he said, a majority of the club’s work is fundraising.
Elhussini said EWBBU is planning smaller fundraising events, including a bake sale and design-a-thon, to simulate the type of work it does abroad.
However, he said the club needs to collect larger donations to accumulate enough funding for trips, so the events are intended more for outreach.
Elhussini said the team is now pursuing grants and corporate sponsorships, which many of the “more well-established” chapters already have. This would fund EWBBU yearly, meaning it would not have to worry as much about fundraising.
Despite these challenges, the team plans to continue working with the school and has even discussed future projects with them.
Armon, vice president of the EWBBU, said the team’s current projects will “revolutionize” the education of students at Ogiek Kwaanza Secondary School.
“Instead of having to miss school and drop enrollment because students are having to provide for their households and get them water, now they can be in school,” she said.
The majority of the students instructed to collect water are girls, Armon said. Since the walk can be particularly dangerous for them, she said female dropout rates have increased severely.
However, the school is now starting to build in-school housing for these students, she said.
“Now that they have boarding … it’s going to get so much better,” she said. “They’re going to be able to create the school that they’ve been dreaming of [and] be able to get those career paths that they want.”
To further improve the quality of these students’ education, the team also provided the school with donated computers from the BU College of Engineering’s IT department.
Elhussini said his biggest takeaway from the entire initiative is that everyone around the world is the same, just born into different circumstances. There is no reason for some students to have less resources than others, he said.
“They want to change the world just as much, if not more, than us,” he said. “It’s pretty motivating and inspiring to see that even though they don’t have everything we have, they have just as much and, if not more, passion to change the world.”
