Water for Villages

Aim: The aim of our "Water for Villages" project is to provide water to three villages in Kavre District. The district lies to the east of Kathmandu towards the border of Tibet. The villages are in the Dhanda ‘Hills’ above the Sun Koshi River. With an average altitude of 1800 meters, there is very limited water supply in the villages. Water is very seasonal and during the months of October to May, there is barely any water available and villagers, often the elderly or small children, have to walk a very long way to carry back vital water. Not only is it hard to get water for drinking and cooking, there is no water to grow food. At this time of year,the villagers have a very poor non-nutritious diet, causing illness and the poor physical development of children.

We plan to install a water pumping and piping system from a nearby water source that will take clean, drinkable water to these villages all year round. Not only will this give the villagers easily accessible water which is vital for life, it will also allow them to irrigate their fields and grow crops. In the future we hope that the villagers will be able to join together and farm crops like potatoes, ginger, garlic and onions on a commercial scale, so rather than patching the problem we are assisting them in developing an income source that will improve the quality of their lives for generations to come.

On a recent trip to the village we did a basic analysis of what is needed to get water to the village. The good thing is that the village already owns a plot of land and rights to a good water source. The water comes from an underground spring which already is collected in an underground tank. The water is currently running to waste as it is not piped to the village. The problem is that the village is 15km away from the water source.

The average daily requirements of a village household with three children, a buffalo and 3 to 5 goats would be around 200 litres just for household use, not taking into account water required for irrigation in times of no rain.
Our next step is to bring in engineers and land surveyors to find out what it is needed to get the water to the village. We hope the project will be three phase.

Land survey and mapping. Establishing a viable idea of what is involved.
Water storage and village piping – construction and upgrading existing water tanks and pipe lines in the village to collect the water and distribute it to the houses.
Piping the water – the construction of solid PVC water pipes under the ground to pipe the water to the village.

This project will take one to two years to set up. In the mean time we are planning on installing water tanks in each house and a guttering system to catch water from tin roofs during times of rain. In the future this rain water collection can be used for irrigating the fields.