Our mission is to work as a center of expertise, collaborating with relevant local and international groups as well as other stakeholders to provide sustainable interventions in water resources management, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and food security for the poor and disadvantaged groups in local communities.
First organized in year 2000, RAWDP is today a legally incorporated body (Incorporated Trustee CAC/IT/No 19596) dated 4th October 2005. Since 2001 we have been promoting sustainable environmental management as the bedrock of healthy environments. Since inception RAWDP has assisted well over 1million households to climb the sanitation ladder and supported well over 5 million households improve their drinking water quality. As a leader in adaptive water management, we bolster local water systems to risks of climate extremes and environmental degradation. We operate within the realms of Coupled Socio-Ecology.
Here in RAWDP, we share in the global vision of a world where people can live in good health and prosperity because their basic health and sanitation needs have been met. The improvement of public health through water and sanitation interventions at the household and community levels remains our driving objective.
We recognize access to safe water to be a fundamental human need as contaminated water jeopardizes the health of all people. Since 2001 we have been promoting sanitation and hygiene education in rural schools and letting students know that simple measures like washing hands with soap and water especially after defecating and before food preparation or eating pays. This draws from our recognition that faeco-oral bacteria are a major contributor to the millions of water-related deaths each year. We promote the knowledge that hygienic disposal of human excreta is of great importance to human health. We work with the poor because they constitute the bulk of those who have no access to improved sources of drinking water, sanitation as well as the political/lobbying process.
The key objective of many of our interventions is to contribute to the reduction of WASH-related morbidity and mortality among vulnerable women and children. This is being done by improving the raw water quality of local rivers, reducing the cost of water treatment and expanding access to safe, sustainable, and equitable WASH services, and by strengthening the WASH enabling environment for sustainable WASH service delivery in institutions and public places. These interventions also seek to address key institutional and facility-level challenges and barriers to WASH using climate-resilient asset management systems.
Access to water, sanitation and hygiene is one of the key aspects to securing the health status of populations affected by humanitarian crises. People who lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation facilities and not practicing proper hygiene are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 and other illnesses. The need for strong epidemic preparedness and response activities using in the WASH sector is therefore essential to avoid the spread of COVID-19.
RAWDP works to increase households demand for latrines/toilets by offering more sanitation product choices to rural households wanting to invest in a toilet. Our goal is to broaden sanitation access for rural people through sustainable partnerships that are anchored on use of market approaches. Our business model seeks to aggregate a wide range of products from different manufacturers and distributing them to local sanitation retailers in small quantities as and when they need it (at attractive price points). On one hand by aggregating demand from a number of wholesalers located in distant market locations across rural areas, RAWDP makes it possible to reduce distribution costs for products that were previously unavailable in local market. On the other hand, RAWDP entrepreneurs have been enabled to offer product choices to customers which are a business advantage over competing non- RAWDP sanitation entrepreneurs. This in turn helps them consolidate their position in the local market and better manage their cash flows and profits. Our team consists of sector specialists and marketing experts.
RAWDP invests in rural people, empowering them to increase their food security, improve the nutrition of their families and increase their incomes. We help them build resilience, expand their businesses, and take charge of their own development.
We do this because every community, no matter how neglected or remote, has one tremendous resource: its people Three quarters of the poorest people in the world live in the rural areas of developing countries. Most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.
Climate change, a growing global population, and volatile food and energy prices have the potential to push millions more vulnerable people into extreme poverty and hunger by 2030. We have developed a cost-effective, people-centered, and partnership-oriented approach that delivers results. Small-scale agriculture is central to our development model, which connects farmers and poor rural women and men to markets and services so they can grow more and earn more.
Agriculture is a proven engine for poverty reduction. GDP growth generated by agriculture is more effective in reducing poverty than growth in any other sector. In sub-Saharan Africa, growth in agriculture reduces poverty up to 11 times faster than growth in other sectors. Our work does more than help rural people grow and earn more. It also promotes gender equality and inclusiveness, builds the capacity of local organizations and communities, and strengthens resilience to climate change. By advocating for poor rural people and financing projects that transform rural areas, our work is critical to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The RAWDP Adaptive Management Program was developed to provide an organization and process for cooperative integration of water resource operations, downstream resource protection and management, and monitoring and research information, as well as to improve the values for which local rivers and their watersheds can be better organized.
Ground water is often sampled to determine its water chemistry, to see if the water is acceptable for human consumption, or to see if industrial activity may have caused contamination. Sampling ground water from monitoring wells has traditionally involved “purging” the well to remove stagnant water that may not be representative of in situ ground water quality. Regulatory guidance often recommends purging a fixed volume of water from the well, usually three to five times the volume of water stored in the well casing and screen. This commonly results in tens or hundreds of gallons of water being purged from each monitoring well on a site and can exceed several hundred gallons per well where wells are deep or large in diameter.
To remove these large volumes efficiently, many practitioners’ resorts to high pumping rates. In shallow wells, devices called bailers are repeatedly dropped into the well and retrieved to remove the purge volume required.
Adaptive management is a dynamic process where people of many talents and disciplines come together to make the right decision in the best interests of the resources.
We offer an adaptive, albeit an alternate view of how to attain the Sustainable Development Goals in rural communities in Africa especially those relating to Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Infant nutrition, Agriculture, Integrated Water Resources and Environmental management goals etc.
Our solutions are unique because we continuously create community engagement strategies that are as robust and adaptive as the outcomes we target. We drive the delivery of the vital development strategies including targeted expansion plans by instituting a learning culture. This enables us to regularly analyze and adjust our strategies and maximize long-term impacts. Also, we install flexible program designs that ensure program design provides flexibility, emphasizing need for the program to learn and improve based on results. Such a design helps explain the program’s approach and set down some impact level targets.
Often, we ensure our program outlines clear ‘pathways’ that describes what systemic changes we expect to achieve and how the program will influence those changes via investments, business innovations and reforms resulting in better functioning environment – through which the poor can work themselves out of poverty.
These pathways for pro-poor growth, jobs and income will be ‘carved’ into niches, making them grow faster and in a more inclusive manner so that the poor take part in and benefit from economic green growth. This expected pathway can then be used as the basis to monitor progress.
Usually, we analyze disaggregated data to identify disparities, and then adopt strategies to reduce those disparities, in addition to applying an equity lens upstream—in the places where people make critical decisions about an initiative.
Applying an equity lens involves working to build trust among stakeholders and clients and working to ensure that all of them can engage fully in the enterprise. Our ability to combine data for action and data for impact; two key aspects of data collection has enabled us to fundamentally transform our application of social innovation, and ultimately delivering social impact far more effectively.