Water for drinking, hygiene and sustainable food sources
As the Holy Month of Ramadhan nears, members of the Lady Fatemah Trust have started preparations to provide food to families in the poorest communities around the world. We will continue to focus on feeding widowed mothers and orphaned children alongside the sick and elderly as society owes them a duty of care to be safe, nourished and comfortable.
In a first for the country, you the donors of the Lady Fatemah Trust enabled a community of 9,000 villagers in Nungwi in Zanzibar to enjoy freshwater through a solar-powered desalination system.
The water from local borewells, many of which contain stagnant water having been abandoned for decades, is polluted and has a very high saline content. This means freshwater needs to be brought in by tankers often erratically and at a high cost. The water would be delivered in large, dirty and heavy containers which villagers, usually women and young children queued up in the hot sun for. They would be given a few litres of water, enough to last barely a day.
In a life-transforming initiative, this installation in the grounds of Nungwi Primary and Secondary School will ensure the 3,000 schoolchildren, teachers and family members stay hydrated.
The project is truly transformational – turning seawater into drinking water and converting the sun into solar energy to power the plant. 15,000 litres of seawater are cleaned and made fit for drinking, washing and irrigation. 8,000-watt solar panels mean it is fully run from renewable energy thereby having a zero-carbon footprint. This will also save litres of polluting diesel that would have been consumed by the water tankers making the journey to the village.
The borewell has submersible water pumps and the remineralisation and pre-filtration, intensive carbon treatment specifically designed to deal with the coastal water around the islands of Zanzibar. 10 rows of vertical farming plantations will be installed in the school grounds to showcase the latest technology to vary crop plantation.
In another unique element of this project, the overseas development agency of Germany has leveraged the donations threefold and therefore each £1 donated has become £3 spent on the work. Not only is this great for funding such transformational projects, but it also helps create a long term partnership to train water engineers, agricultural specialists and drive development in the community.
Now, instead of the mothers and children standing in queues, children can go to school and mothers get a chance to learn about and develop their agriculture training.
Your generosity has always remained ever-flowing and following the success of this first of its kind project in Zanzibar, work to install the second unit on the southern tip of the island at the village of Makunduchi is now underway.
This installation is located at the Makunduchi District Hospital where a birthing clinic sees the safe delivery of over 5,000 children each year will be enabled thanks to your care, love and support.
The 1,000 litres per hour desalinated water at this hospital will serve both doctors and patients at the hospital as well as the 5,000 local villagers. Dependency on water trucked in over long distances will soon be a thing of the past for thousands of island residents, just like 85,000 villagers on the neighbouring island of Pemba now have safe access to freshwater, thanks to you!
The water for drinking, washing and irrigation projects of the Lady Fatemah Trust across Asia and East Africa have shown a very different model of creating food sustainability. Centres like The Salaam Centre in North Harrow collected funds for water projects on farms in the Sindh Province of Pakistan.
In all, with support from individuals like you and communities like The Salaam Centre, over 100 farms of up to five acres have been irrigated and the rural communities in these areas are enjoying good yields of staple crops not only to sustain themselves but also feed the wider community through markets. In fact, one borewell, a submersible pump, the water tank and irrigation channels for arable land to be cultivated yields enough food for at least 200 people per installation.
These families are now food independent, growing their own fresh and nutritious iftar but also eating wholesome food all year round. The work carries on with a further 75 farms in Pakistan. To get involved in supporting this project, providing safe desalinating drinking water costs just £10 per family.