Friendly Water for the World July 2021 newsletter

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Subject: Friendly Water for the World July 2021 newsletter

Hi Friend,

Welcome to the July issue of our monthly newsletter. The first thing you'll probably notice is that after a year of testing our communications and getting feedback from our community, we have renamed and redesigned this newsletter. We want to make it both more readable and also use a consistent design across all of our communications.

Each month the newsletter will be introduced by someone new. The introduction will be followed by the main story for the month and then a final section with updates about our work and our world.

The new newsletter name comes directly from our mission statement:

"Friendly Water for the World trains and equips communities in sustainable village-scale technologies to safeguard, conserve, and expand essential resources."

We want this newsletter to help equip you with the essential resources you need to engage with and move our work forward.

This first edition is a special issue of Essential Resources. We are going to take a look back at all we have accomplished together so far this year. It's an encouraging list and suggests many successes to come.

On behalf of our community of staff, volunteers, and supporters, we wish you peace and kindness.

William G Forester

Marketing and Communications

Building On Success

We have recently launched a program to build one million liters of water security in Matsakha, Kenya.

Developing our largest ever Water Security program did not happen overnight (to learn more about that program, make sure you sign up below for our next Chat). It was created through three years of staff-led program testing and evaluation, technology testing and evaluation, and local relationship building.

Most importantly, the path to this new program was built one success at a time. From developing rewarding relationships to selling soap, fabricating bricks, and testing new rainwater catchment tanks, each success has played a role in moving our work towards bigger goals and achievements.

2,000 liters of soap

Those small successes started just after the New Year. While most of the world was still managing the Covid-19 pandemic, we were able to initiate a training session for members of Matsakha Development Group (MDG) to learn how to make soap. That successful session was made possible in part by:

obtaining soap-making guidance from a chemical engineer
creating a custom soap recipe for Matsakha
finding a source for soap ingredients in Nairobi
driving to Nairobi to collect the ingredients
identifying a place to store and make the soap
testing and validating the ingredients
developing a training course for MDG members
creating a multipurpose soap sustainability plan
winning national KEBS certification

The sustainability plan itself was built upon numerous conversations with the community and program stakeholders. This is all the work that happens 'behind the scenes'.

This Good Hygiene program has grown by leaps and bounds since the training. MDG has sold 2,000 liters of their "Meta" multipurpose soap so far this year. Most importantly, the soap was submitted for and successfully won national KEBS certification. The certification was even presented to MDG by local officials who have started to take an active role in promoting this program.

The certification enables the team to sell their soap in stores and around the country. Not only has the soap been sold in large quantities to schools, but businesses in the local market have recently been using Meta soap at their required hand-washing stations to help prevent Covid-19 transmission.

10,000 bricks

With our first program in Matsakha starting to scale, we then launched a Building Better program with MDG. We purchased two Interlocking Stabilized Soil Brick machines for the community and trained several of the MDG members on how to use them.

This program demonstrated the strength of our new Build Center approach. We originally purchased a straight-brick and a curved-brick press for Matsakha. In anticipation of the next program, we realized that the community would benefit from having two curved-brick presses. Fortunately, another curved-brick press was in use just down the road at another program connected to our Kakamega Build Center. We were able to easily switch presses with our Kambiri Building Better program by delivering them in our new Build Center van (purchased through the generosity of Denny and Carol Kautzmann, Kathleen O'Shaunessy, and Greg and Mary Ellen Psaltis). Another small success built upon an integrated approach to our programs.

The MDG team has been hard at work testing soil, pressing bricks, and curing them at the schools where they are going to be used. Much of this work was built on the success of our Kambiri program. We launched Building Better there late last year. Since that time our Programs Manager, Eric Lijodi, and his team have pressed over 10,000 bricks. We've successfully built and run a brick-making program, learned about different kinds of murram, created new soil mixtures, performed press maintenance, and discovered how environmental factors influence brick-curing.

We have sold 1,000 bricks and have outstanding orders for 7,000 more. Through our Build Centers, we are now able to customize and then compare programs between builds. While our Kambiri Building Better program is designed to optimize our brick-making process and sell directly to the local community, our Matsakha Building Better program is currently focused on pressing bricks to be used in rainwater catchment tanks.

Curved-brick tanks

This year we succeeded in building tanks in an entirely new way. We partnered with our Kenyan-based engineering partner Makiga to build our first tank using curved interlocking stabilized soil bricks. These curved bricks are made right on-site, require no mortar to fit together, and can be put together quickly.

Our first curved-brick tank was made in Kambiri where we could evaluate the design and test long-term function. We have made modifications to the first design and are in the process of having engineering drawings completed by local authorities so the tanks can easily be built anywhere by our trained masons.

All of these successes build upon each other to create a new Water Security program in Matsakha. Fifty new tanks will be installed providing an initial one million liters of capacity for schools and their local communities. MDG has already pressed 5,000 bricks for the first tanks and we have created site surveys to acquire all the data needed to build tanks to ground specifications.

Thanks to your support, encouragement, and action, the first six months of this year have been our most productive and accomplished ever. We expect even bigger things for the second half of 2021 as our existing programs scale in Matsakha, Kambiri, and Malimba, and new builds and programs launch through our Build Centers in Kakamega and Monze.

Monthly Chat

Join us for part 2 of our Chat about one million liters of water security. Last month we shared all the successes we have achieved this year, both big and small, on our path to creating this new Water Security program. Now, we get to discuss the program itself – installing one million liters of rainwater catchment tank capacity at schools in Matsakha, Kenya.

This new program has the chance to impact the lives of at least 650 students of all ages, their teachers and staff, and the families they all return to at the end of each day. On Friday, July 30 from Noon-1:00 pm (Pacific time), learn how this program is going to work, and who it will work for.

>> Register for the Chat

In Brief

>> Watch our last Chat about one million liters of water security.

>> We continue to test our program technologies. We are about to start cooking on a new rocket stove in Matsakha and plan on digging new permagardens to test in Kambiri.

>> Following successful visits by our Coach, we are now planning Community Engagement events with three communities in Zambia - Hamadunga, Hamooya, and Munamoomba.

>> We await more advanced communications with our Bukobero partners as Uganda slowly starts to exit their second lock-down caused by Covid-19.

>> Have you seen our recently released 2020 Annual Report?

>> Our next board meeting will be held on Tuesday, July 20th at 4:30. Register here.

>> Have a question or suggestion? Send an email to will@friendlywater.org.

Please share our work and invite others to join our mission.

FRIENDLY WATER FOR THE WORLD

https://friendlywater.org

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Subject: Friendly Water for the World July 2021 newsletter