How long does it take you to get water to drink? When I’m at the CARE office in DC, it takes me about 40 seconds, and that’s because I walk the long way to the filter. I always know that water is safe to drink. For nearly 30% of the people CARE works with in Yemen, it can take more than an hour to get water for the day, and they have no idea if it’s clean.
Imagine everything you would have to stop doing if you had to take an hour to get water every time you needed some. What would you do when you got that hour back? In Yemen, people are using that hour to grow more food, prepare more diverse diets, and participate in water management committees.
Yemen’s Emergency Assistance for Vulnerable and Conflict-Affected Communities ran from 2017-2018 with $10 million from USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. It reached 242,000 people directly, and 128,000 indirectly.
What have we accomplished?
- People have safer water: People are 5.5 times more likely to have safe water, and 90% more people have more than the minimum required of 15 liters of clean water a day. People are also 3 times more likely to treat their water before drinking.
- People have more time: The number of people who spend less than 30 minutes a day to collect water has doubled—freeing up time to focus on other activities.
- People have more food: Families are twice as likely to have enough food, and they are eating 50% more diverse diets. They also have an extra month every year where they don’t have to worry about where food is coming from.
- Communities are cleaner: People are twice as likely to have toilets to use, and 2.6 times more likely to wash their hands.
How did we get there?
- Help communities manage their resources: 87% of the time, communities set up water committees that could manage water sources and help families improve access to water.
- Use cash: The project set up cash for work opportunities so people could have jobs and rebuild infrastructure like roads and wells.
- Support production: The project distributed seeds and tools so families could grow more food. As a result, they were 10 times more likely to grow vegetables at the end of a project.
Want to learn more?
Check out the project evaluation.