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Water
Winner = Nicaragua
Nicaragua
Applicant: AsoFenix
Project: Rural Electrification and clean water
In many countries access to and supply of water (in combination with a lack of energy) is a big challenge. Sun and water are ideal partners to tackle this problem: solar water pumps in combination with a community water supply system can change the lives of many people for better. In Nicaragua over 80% of the rural population have no access to clean drinking water. Women and girls walk many miles to fetch fresh spring water for their families, balancing 20-Liter-jugs on their heads. The local water in their own village is muddy and infested with parasites. Green Empowerment partnered with Asofenix a Nicaraguan to improve the lives of the rural people. They install solar powered pumps, lay water pipes together with the villagers thus providing more than 1000 people near the capital Managua with clean drinking water. Entirely CO2-neutral. For the local people this is an inconceivable luxury. Life in the region has seen radical change, as clean water means a new life! Without feeling guilty, villagers can enjoy a bath, wash their laundry, and even water their little gardens. And to supply the villages with even more electricity small hydro power plants are built as well.
Nepal
Applicant: HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation
Project: WARM - Integrated Water Resource Management
Access to water is a human right! This is the aim of the project WARM (Water Resource Management)! It supports local authorities in distributing the available water resources in their municipalities with social justice, economic efficiency and optimal utilization in mind – to all Nepalese regardless of their status in society. Overall water utilization plans are created, specific small projects regarding water and residential hygiene are supported, and the competencies of municipal authorities, service providers and organizations are promoted via training. The core of the project is sustainable handling of water resources. Improved understanding of hygiene contributes to improving the health situation in villages. The education of small enterprises toward latrine and well construction creates jobs and income. The approach of the project is „help to self-organization“: individuals become small entrepreneurs, plumbers or well managers.
Rwanda
Applicant: COVAGA Cooperative
Project: Conservation and purification of water by removing water hyacinth in lakes for poverty reduction
Water is Life – and a scarce resource in Africa. A further problem in fresh-water bodies in Africa is that hyacinths overgrow fresh-water bodies at a frightening speed. A bed of such plants will deprive living beings of all sunlight. The consequence is that animals and plants underneath it die. The Covaga Cooperative in Rwanda has now launched a successful project: Local people collect the plants called amarebe out of rivers and let them dry in the sun. After drying, these herbs are used to produce various materials – like handbags, shoes, hats, vessels and even chairs. In the Bugesera district, there are nine rivers, most of them containing these amarebe. The Covaga Cooperative harvests these plants from two rivers and from the Akagera valley in order to protect the animals living in these rivers. By removing the amarebe, the cooperative also stops the degradation of water. Not only souvenirs: protecting nature is important for tourism in a more general sense. People come to Rwanda to see crocodiles and hippos. Those animals now have better chances of survival in the open nature. So the project has at least three benefits: it protects nature, combats poverty, and at the same time gets all these neat products for everyday use, made of natural fibres.