Splash Gets an Early Report Card from Ethiopia

On October 12th, 2016, Splash received the following email from Dawit Alemishet, Splash Director of Ethiopia:

“Dear all,

I would love to share the inspiration of my day while visiting our partner site, the Edget Besira Primary School. I just cannot sleep without telling you of this testimonial I received from the school’s principal.

The Edget Besira Primary School is located near the largest open market of Merkato in Teklhaymanot area. In this new academic year, more than 1,250 students have already enrolled in the school. Most of the school children are coming from the very poor families living in slum houses. One of the biggest challenges of the school was that most of the children are involved in the street vending labor to cover their lunch and other personal expenses. Therefore, they were missing the afternoon class often. When Splash intervened there was only nonfunctional taps, water reservoir, pipelines, and damaged water station, and out of service latrines.

Fortunately, with Splash’s intervention supported by the Lake Union Rotary Club of Seattle and the Rotary Club of Addis Ababa West, this terrible situation was changed. Both the primary and kindergarten campuses now have separate child-friendly water stations for drinking and hand washing purposes. We built two drinking stations with 24 taps, and 15 taps for two hand washing stations. In total, we put 5 water stations in the school that connected to the two water filtration systems. In addition, we provided two water tanks with the volume of 5,000 liters and rehabilitated existed water reservoir tanks and facilities. Of course, our hygiene team has given excellent trainings as well during the last year.”

Dawit went on to say the school staff had reported that, in one year since Splash’s intervention and assistance in accessing existing public financing:

• The student’s attendance doubled;
• The pass rate increased from 45% to 94%; and
• The school had effectively used over 90% of their annual allotment for infrastructure improvement.

“The parents are now asking for their children to stay in the school the whole day because their children are performing so well. I hope the health impact is there too. Though our contribution is like a small drop, our work is having an immediate impact. I am very happy to able to see and hear of this contribution with Splash. Thank you all for supporting this life changing project in Ethiopia with Splash!

I hope you enjoyed this report.

Regards, Dawit”

Splash whole-heartedly thanks Dawit and his team for their tireless work, Rotary International for funding this project, and all our donors who support Splash’s clean water projects around the globe.