When she returned to her home country, 20 years after running from the civil war that destroyed Liberia, the founder and president of FACE Africa, an organization that promotes the development of the water and sanitation infrastructures in rural areas of the Sub-Saharan Africa, embraced this cause.  

“I am passionate about education and thought that educating children would be a way of helping them having a future”, said on an interview to Lusa, the water activist that was in Lisbon last week to participate on the 1st Edition of the EurAfrican Forum.  

But the barriers to education were more profound than it looked at first sight. And Saran understood that going to school also depended on the access to clean water: children missed classes because they got sick with that lack of quality of water they drank, because schools didn’t have the adequate installations, mainly when talking about girls on the puberty age, or because the girls had to walk long distances to fetch water for their families.

“The transportation of water is a task almost exclusively feminine in Africa. Women and girls spend 40 million hours every year, walking long distances to fetch water. That’s why many girls don’t go to school. They are occupied with this and other domestic tasks and they can’t be productive”, noted.  

Saran repeats the number: 40 million hours. As much as the French workers send per year, according to the United Nations, that made this calculation to demonstrate how this task affects the life of many African women.

“Water is related to the other areas, health, productivity, economic development, education or gender equality”. This is a feminine problem, so, when we solve a water problem, we are also giving more power to women”, added.

Water can be the, Saran believes, the catalyst for these changes: “When we install a water system on a village, water becomes closer. It’s more free time that women and girls have available to go to school, to dedicate to agriculture and to trade or other productive activities”.

O FACE Africa was born in 2008, with na educationl fund, but rapidly evolved to WASH programs (Water, Sanitation and Higiene), counting today with more 50 communitiy that benefit 25.000 people.

On Liberia, that “went through a civil war that destroyed the whole social, infrastructure, energy, streets, health care fabrics”, FACE Africa is one of the organizations of civil society that searches to help solving multiple challenges that the Government “can’t solve”, said the responsible of the organization.

FACE Africa works independently and faces the local communities as the main partner.

“We have to ensure that they are part of the process: we teach to build the system and how to maintain it, so when it is ready they can feel has theirs and they can know how to make a reparation, if it is necessary”, he added.

On the bottom of this is a simple concept: to build infrastructures of capture and low-cost water treatment and low sophisticated technology so that their communities can be responsible for their building and maintenance.    

For now, FACE Africa is acting only in Liberia and Nigeria, but the goal is to reach all Africa, replicating the model in other countries, including the PALOP.

Saran refered that they receive every kind of requests on their online portal, and admited that the limited resources don’t allow all answer all the solicitations immediatly.

“It is necessary to raise funds and to ensure support. It is hard to choose who we are going to help first, focusing generally on small communities and give priority to the projects according with the partnerships that we can create on local level”, explained.

By Lusa, July 2018