Archive for 'water & sanitation'
On the road the other day and decided to swing by and see how the rain harvesting scheme at Gidan Mutan Daya primary school, Katsina was getting on now, over 3 months into the dry season. When I last visited the tanks had just received the first rains and we were curious to see how long into the dry season [...]
Every year, like kids on a school trip to the zoo, DFID lets its education and health advisers all meet up to take stock and share their experiences over the past 12 months. Last week we gathered in Nairobi to swap notes and learn from one another, grateful (after a lot of economising) that the [...]
During the last few months, I've been working away at my desk job in London, as well as making a couple of monitoring visits to Zambia & Madagascar. As a keen cyclist, I was interested to meet the Zambikes social business in Lusaka, who've been building high quality bikes in Zambia, including a Zambulance and a Zamcart - bicycle-propelled medical transport and a heavy load [...]
Many things are taken for granted in the developed world, but I think that clean water must be at the top of the list. One of my little luxuries when I get back to the UK after a few months overseas is putting my toothbrush under a running tap; I have to use bottled water [...]
My colleagues and I went to Mbuji Mayi (capital of Kasai-Oriental Province) for three days to attend the opening ceremony for the first water network out of eleven that will be constructed in Mbuji Mayi using DFID funds. The day started early and we were at the airport by 6am. After a short plane trip and [...]
Baobab trees (genus Adansonia) are found in Africa and Australia, and have the ability to store literally tens of thousands of litres of water within their trunk giving them their distinctive shape. This gives rise to their informal name of 'bottle tree'. In dry Northern Nigeria baobabs are common, with the leaves, locally known as kuka, being [...]
Just in case you’ve missed it - Joanna Lumley is in Nepal this week! She’s been called a “Goddess of Nepal”, and has arrived for the first time to meet Gurkhas and their families, for whom she has campaigned so successfully. I met her earlier this week and she’s lovely – down to earth and [...]
Do you think announcements by British Government Ministers make any difference at all to people in Rwanda? If I told the woman in the red cap who walks everyday along the road past my front gate here in Kigali what Douglas Alexander and Jack Straw said today (7th July), would she take any interest? I reckon that [...]
It was a real pleasure to meet Octavio Dosantos in the Patrice Lumumba health centre during my recent visit as part of the annual evaluation of the health sectors performance in Mozambique. Octavio had recently been transferred to this health centre, which we visited shortly after torrential rain had filled the entrance drive way with [...]
It is day 2 of the field visit of the annual joint review and I am sitting sweating in a dingy hotel room with no functioning air-con, but with a most fantastic sea view. I've attached a shot of the beach just to make you jealous...
I am writing up the outcome of the day's visit [...]
