International Projects: Milola, Tanzania
One of the biggest challenges society faces today is finding clean and reliable sources of drinking water. In Tanzania, a country located on the eastern coast of Africa, access to clean, safe water is a major concern in rural areas due to limited resources and inadequate sanitation, leading to many health, environmental, and socio-economic problems.
We have partnered for our projects with the Salvatorian Sisters, a group belonging to the Sisters of the Divine Savior who work with communities in Tanzania through their operations of schools and dispensaries in addition to providing their expert skills in medicine and architecture. Throughout the project, they provided the team with food, housing, and transportation.
We have partnered for our projects with the Salvatorian Sisters, a group belonging to the Sisters of the Divine Savior who work with communities in Tanzania through their operations of schools and dispensaries in addition to providing their expert skills in medicine and architecture. Throughout the project, they provided the team with food, housing, and transportation.
Rainwater Harvesting in Dar es Salaam
In order to meet the needs of a rapidly growing nation, the Salvatorian Sisters have constructed a new primary school building outside the city of Dar es Salaam in Buyuni, Tanzania, in which students began attending classes in January of 2020. After being connected with The Sisters, the student-lead chapter of Engineers Without Borders at Michigan State University designed a rainwater harvesting system for this school. The implementation of this project will benefit the 600 students and teachers, in addition to the surrounding community. After designing the system, the next step was to install the rainwater collection system at the partially built school, which incorporated a gutter system, tanks with a first flush system, and an overflow system. The water will be non-potable but can be used for cleaning, crop irrigation, water for animals, and flushing toilets. The team initially traveled at the end of August 2017 for the first phase of implementation for the rainwater harvesting system. The most recent travel for the project took place in May of 2018 for the second phase of implementation in which all materials were purchased, the tanks were all installed, and plans for the overflow system were finalized. The team plans to close out the project in the end of 2020 by assessing its progress remotely. In the future, our Tanzania team hopes to continue working with the Salvatorian Sisters to explore other projects with the potential to improve access to clean water. There is still engineering to be done! |
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Well Improvement in Milola
After assessing the progress of the rainwater harvesting system in Buyuni and closing out the project, MSU EWB will continue their work in Tanzania to improve local access to water. The project will be taken on in conjunction with the Tanzania Partnership Program (TPP), a collaboration with local universities in Tanzania to cultivate integrated development in the sectors of education, water, economy, agriculture, and food.
Ngwenya, like Buyuni, is a rural village outside of Milola, Tanzania, with very limited access to water. Access to spring water is limited due to poorly functioning piping that doesn’t allow for equitable distribution of water to all the villages along the system. Consequently, villages like Ngwenya that are located far from the springs and do not have effective connection to the distribution system must rely on wells as a source of water. However, reaching the wells can require miles of travel, and this burden is often endured by women and girls collecting water for their families and communities. To make matters worse, a low water table makes it difficult to access water from the shallow-dug wells, resulting in an unreliable and unclean water supply.
Our Tanzania team looks to travel to Milola within the next year to assess the needs of the community by evaluating the functionality of the wells and pumps being currently used and testing the quality of the water supply. An initial assessment will allow for the team to gauge the possibilities for drilling new wells, make improvements to the pumps and, more importantly, collaborate with the community to determine the engineering solutions best-suited to sustainably address their needs and empower them to meet their own needs in the future.
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