Clean water for better education
The Bon Pasteur de Kinazi school in the south of Rwanda accommodates 233 boarding students.
Until 2009, the school had a very hard time buying enough clean water. Large part of the school’s budget was spent on the monthly need to boil water for drinking and washing.
With the support of Belgium, the school installed eleven water reservoirs in 2010 of 10 m³ each. The reservoirs collect rainwater thus ensuring the school has its own clean water and has to buy less of it. Thanks to the reservoirs, the water bill was reduced from 74,000 to only 9,500 Rwandan francs per month, which is a gigantic improvement.
With the released funds, the school can now invest in education instead. It wants to extend its range of options to include more students in the boarding school in the near future.
An additional advantage of this solution is that rainwater is no longer pouring down the roofs and eroding the slopes around the school. The surroundings of the school and the environment are also benefitting from it.
Jonas Ntagawa, headmaster of the school, is very happy about the simple but efficient solution. “We now have more than enough water”, he says. “Students no longer have to go without water. What’s more, our water bill is only a fraction of what it used to be. And the fact that we are also preventing erosion is a nice plus.”
Or how a few simple water reservoirs are helping education in Rwanda.
