Water Environment and Sanitation
In Egypt, where the vast majority of the country’s people live on the narrow strip of arable land along the Nile Valley, a fast-growing population means ever more crowded living conditions, and competition for resources that are becoming scarcer. One of the most important of these resources is clean, safe water for drinking, washing, and cooking. Unfortunately, there are many villages in rural Egypt that continue to rely on water delivery and waste disposal systems that are outdated, unhygienic, and therefore unsafe. As a result, the situation with regard to safe drinking water, household sanitation, and the immediate environment within these communities is far from satisfactory. One of the main ways in which UNICEF is working to address these issues is through the Village Environmental Assistance Project (VEAP). Supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), this project aims to extend access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation to 0.5 million people, living in deprived, relatively isolated villages of Fayoum, Beni Suef, and Minya governorates. The VEAP works by following three main tracks at the same time : ensuring the water supply is safe; working to improve sanitation; and providing hygiene education aimed to improve hygienic and environmental awareness and behaviour. Planned to end in July 2005, the project has been underway for four years and has so-far reached 400,000 people. Thirty-seven villages have received new, small-scale water distribution networks that connect 1,600 families to a safe supply of potable water. Nine thousand three hundred “pour-flush” latrines have been constructed in 30 different villages, ensuring vastly improved human waste disposal, and a series of training sessions has been conducted for government, NGOs and communities to carry out effective sanitation and hygiene promotional activities. UNICEF has developed a number of different ways of teaching communities about hygiene and the environment. Volunteers from the project villages were trained in areas such as personal hygiene, safe methods of handling water, and assessment and reporting on environmental problems in their villages. By training volunteers in the skills necessary to take care of their own families, and also in methods of communicating what they have learned to others, UNICEF hopes that the message will be spread effectively and accurately to many times the number of people who attended the training.
Aside from these courses, a door-to-door awareness campaign supported by booklets, posters, and calendars, the project also included a puppet show. Featuring the well-known Egyptian folk character Goha, the puppet show toured the areas where the project was being implemented, spreading the messages of the communication campaign in an entertaining and culturally appropriate way.
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