Follow Up Learnings

The follow up visits are really important.  It’s a continuation of everyone getting to know one another around the use and training with the treated water.  At about a year, the operator (Kwahu Praso) will have to begin, if not already begun, to figure out things like getting new filters, replenishing bottle caps, turnover of personnel, the “newness” of their processes, and so on.

In the case of Kwahu Praso, almost all the above items have come into play.  One by one they have figured out, for the most part, how to further their ownership and care of the system.

One thing that we (LWW) learned is that it will help greatly if we give each location a listing of the shops, addresses and a map of where they are located in Accra for filters, caps & bottles.  Every location has someone going to Accra all the time and the operator shouldn’t have to wait for a Michael, Charles, etc. to bring them these items from Accra.  Sort of obvious once we talked out loud about it!

The filling station room is impeccable.  They have a rule about no shoes in the room - how do I know - I stepped into the room with shoes on!  The operators filling bottles remove their shoes prior to entering the filling room.

The water room with the board looked almost exactly we left it - very clean and organization.

The water storage tank had a small leak in one of the pipes that the clinic has a plumber coming to fix.

We were happy to hear that the clinic and the schools are still working closely together around the distribution of the water and there are probably ways we can help them more going forward, i.e. more bottles and hand pumps.

The kids in the schools for the most part still have cups to use, but are now starting to see the problem of replenishing the personnel cups.  We are going to let the schools and clinic work through this to see what they develop as an everlasting solution.

The schools, according to Paulina and Winfred, have incorporated parts of the LWW health & hygiene curriculum into their classroom curriculum....we didn’t know which parts - but everyone laughing know the song “Use This Water” was definitely incorporated!

The clinic right now has 2 dispensers for the 20L bottle.  Mr. Tete would really like to see 1 in each ward (5).  The maternity ward would be the next ward to receive a dispenser as the women coming for pre-brith care have to take a series of anti-malaria pills during each trimester.  The patients also like the “chilled” side of the dispenser water :).