Free Flow

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ater

ducation

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nstitutional

evelopment

companion student activity book on water, health, sanitation and

disease prevention, as well as water cycle and watershed posters and

companion student activity books. The materials would be distrib-

uted through a train-the-trainer process, with Project WET working

with core groups of local education leaders in Northern Uganda,

Rwanda and Tanzania, not only to use the new resources but also

to help their fellow teachers implement the programme.

Keenly interested in getting the new resources to his colleagues

and to the pupils at Lake Victoria Primary School, Oluka waited

for the materials to be finished and implemented them swiftly once

he had them in hand. Focusing first on the biggest problem – the

unchecked spread of waterborne diseases – Oluka and his fellow

teachers worked to improve children’s water use habits, stressing

hand washing, water purification and water source protection.

According to Oluka, things started to change for the better.

“The efforts of Project WET in my school have been realized from

the change of behaviour in the pupils’ use of water, which wasn’t the

case previously,” Oluka said. “This has led to the reduction of so many

waterborne diseases, especially diarrhoea and typhoid, and it has also

changed the hygiene of the pupils and the sanitation of the school.

With students’ health improving, Oluka felt ready to move beyond

the classroom to empower students to make meaningful changes in

their school and community. One of the main areas of difficulty was

the amount of water available to the school: now that the students

knew the importance of hand washing with soap, they needed more

safe water with which to do it. Unfortunately, the school’s water bill

was already more than US$600 a month, a huge sum in a country

where the World Bank estimates the annual per capita gross national

income is just US$1,310.

Working with students from his classroom and in

after-school clubs, Oluka asked Lake Victoria Primary

School leaders if they could set up a rainwater harvest-

ing system using a 10,000-litre water tank that had

been left idle. Oluka and his students were granted

permission and set up the system with help from the

community. The school’s available water increased

substantially, even as their water bill dropped dramati-

cally, to around US$30 a month.

And Oluka and his students did not stop there.

After learning about the impact of improperly disposed

trash on water resources in their Project WET lessons,

the students launched a campus-wide clean-up, which

led to a paper recycling programme when they noticed

that much of what they were collecting was waste paper.

They then used the paper to make cardboard pieces from

which they could hang teaching materials.

“The impact of this is that there is reduction in

compound littering. We are also able to sell some of

this cardboard we produce to sustain our project,”

Oluka explained.

Increased enrolment (and an increase in the number of

teachers), ready access to boiled water for safe consump-

tion, multiple hand-washing stations and higher scores

on the Ugandan National Exams are additional positive

changes documented at Lake Victoria School through

follow-up interviews with students and teachers.

The results have made Aggrey Oluka a strong advo-

cate for water education after seeing its potential to

At a workshop in Uganda, teachers find out how to incorporate highly interactive pedagogical methods to teach about water resources