Creating access to water supply and sanitation through partnership

Friendship Support Association is implementing two projects in partnership with Tearfund Horn of African Regional Office in Ethiopia. The first project focuses on WASH and the second one is on providing humanitarian support to 875 households in Gawwane Woreda (province) whose livelihood has been affected by desert locust infestation.

Since 2020, FSA has started working in partnership with Tearfund to construct two solar powered borehole wells. The project has successfully installed the first pump and the Afar community has started drinking clean water from this well.

The man’s name is Abobeker Ali. He is a 60-year-old man who has twelve children and twenty Grandchildren. Mr. Abobeker is one of the village elders and is now using the water well that FSA constructed. I approached him and asked him what he thinks about the new well that FSA provided for his village. Abobeker said, “I didn’t expect to have a well working with solar power here in my village. Our ancestors refused to drink any groundwater, which was drilled by machine and they taught us very well only to drink water from the river. They believed that if we drank water from the well it might cause a lot of damage to us. They believed the well water was coming from hell.

Therefore, no one in our village had the desire to have a well. Even twenty years ago the regional government offered to drill us a well but all our leaders, including myself, turned down the offer. The whole village has used water from the Kebena River for decades. We used to walk four hours to fetch water and our livestock had access to water from the same river.