It’s been just over 1 month since our #Saharmattan 2018 winter program businesses opened! We’ve loved getting to know our 16 newest entrepreneurs and chat clean water with new families! There have been highs, there have been lows, but we are committed to working in these villages for at LEAST another 119 more months, so we know this is just the beginning.
Click on the links below for a summary of how each new business is doing by the numbers, followed by our monitoring transcripts. Some of the January monitoring transcripts are missing, since we transitioned to a different survey January 20th and it took a week or so for us to work out the kinks!
Before you wade into the messy details of Saha data, here are some quick explanations of what numbers mean, how we collect them, and why certain things look the way they do. If you are a data viz wiz, feel free to skip right to the fun stuff.
- Visits to the Village – this is just in the first month! More recent visits aren’t included in this summary.
- Graph of Percentages of Households (HH) with Polytank Water (PT) – look at the Y axis! These graphs do not span from 0% to 100%. In Nomnayili, for example, the graph goes from 65% to 100%.
- Savings – This graph charts responses to the question, “How much do you currently have saved for replacement parts?” So it can fluctuate based on expenditures or even who you talk to!
And now – THE SUMMARIES.
Kujeri – *spoiler alert* sadly, the dugout has dried out, but the women are working to get a motorking to bring water. This means they pay an off-roading tricycle to drive to another source of water transport water back in storage containers, for a fee. Of course, Saha will be there to help the business restart once it rains again and the dugout stores water. While difficult for the community, it’s not uncommon for dugouts to dry out as the dry season continues, and at Saha we believe we would rather people have clean water for as many months of the year as possible. And the good news is that, like in Kujeri, there are ways to transport water from other sources to treat (though this added cost and logistics management makes the business a little more difficult to run). You’ll see this reflected in lower percentages of households that have clean water, or empty polytanks – indicators to our team that operations are not business as usual. Ultimately, we find that once the rain fills the closer source again, it’s pretty easy to get the business back up and running again. Check out these blog posts on seasonal transitions to read more context.
Naviali Guma – *spoiler alert* sadly, the stream has dried out, but the women have moved the center to town and are working with a motoking and have increased prices to cover the cost of transportation. Read the Kujeri spoiler for more seasonal explanations. Saha will be there to help the business restart once it rains again.
If you have any questions, email our awesome Operations Coordinator, Heidi at [email protected] . We’re figuring out how to make it easier to check up on your village’s status, so stay tuned to our “sustainability” page.
Thank you for your support.
