Kettering Rotarians' pride at water project helping villagers in one of world's poorest countries

Kettering Rotarians have spoken of their pride after they helped a project to supply running water in part of one of the world’s poorest countries.

The Rotary Club of Kettering Huxloe is celebrating the completion of a scheme to improve sanitation in the remote community of Kavre Pokhari in Nepal.

For people living in Nepal’s mountainous regions, often the only way to get fresh water is to go down and collect it at a stream or pond and carry it uphill over long distances to meet everyday needs of drinking, washing, cooking and tending to animals or crops.

Kettering Huxloe joined a number of other Rotary clubs in the East Midlands to bring a £20,000 project to fruition. Backed by a grant of £8,000 from The Rotary Foundation, the clubs partnered with a UK charity called Renewable World which installed equipment so an array of solar panels power a pump, which delivers water uphill to a small reservoir in the Kavre Pokhari community.

Rotary member Robert Dixon said: “The great feature of this type of technology is the neat way of using solar electricity without the need to store it in batteries.

"When the sun shines, water is pumped up to the reservoir, where it is then available to local people at any time, day or night. The water reservoir acts, in effect, as a storage medium, like a battery.”

The project required an average of 40,000 litres of water to be pumped up 200m every day and this called for a large number of solar panels to generate 9 kilowatts of peak power.

The completed project is already bringing benefits to the village’s residents who no longer need to trek down to the local water source several times a day to collect water. Fresh water is now always available on tap and villagers’ personal standards of hygiene are improving. It has also been possible, as an extension of the project, to improve the sanitation arrangements at the community’s secondary school. Previously the standards of sanitation at the school were so poor that pupils, particularly girls, would frequently skip class which affected their studies, but now attendance levels are on the rise.

The ready availability of running water is also helping to support agriculture in the Kavre Pokhari community, something which provides a large part of the income of many of the community’s families.

Kettering Huxloe’s president, Norman Bristow, said: “We are proud to have been involved in this great project which is making a tangible difference to the lives of 800 or so people far away in Nepal.

"Whilst Rotary’s focus is always on supporting our local communities, we also care about the well-being of people the world over.”