Vessels full of time and good scores.

Muyange and Muruta primary schools of MUYINGA province in the north east of Burundi, have been losing their school time due to water collection for their school meal project. That project is funded by some humanitarian NGOs, after that, local authorities noted a mass dropping out in schools because of hunger. When the project started school authorities realised that they were sometimes obliged to send children to fetch water during school time, and these children were losing at least 2 hours a day for water collection. With World Vision intervention, rain harvested water has solved that problem and now children are dedicating all their time to studying. This reduced drop outs, absences and increased school scores among children.

Nine-year-old Jean Marie Karangwa is one of those children; he used to come to class soaking wet. 
Jean Marie, a Grade 2 student, was wet from the river and ponds he had to wade into to collect water for the school. His school uniform was drenched from sweat from collecting water for the school’s food programme. His back ached too, he says, from carrying the water buckets.
When World Vision Burundi partnered with the World Food Program to implement the school meal programme, to prevent more children from dropping out of school because of hunger, they had to find a solution to the lack of water at the school.

At first, the school sent children to collect water from the nearby open water sources.

Muyange and Muruta primary school authorities realised that sending children to collect water during school time  was an unwanted choice.
“Entre deux maux il faut choisir le moindre, between two worse things, it is better to choose the least,” says Esperance Niyonzima, the head mistress of Muyange primary school.  “Many of these children do not have enough food at their homes and most of them have been dropping out because of that. It is better for them at least to lose two hours a day instead of dropping out. We were aware that it was a big loss in terms of school time, but we had nothing else to do because water is a big issue in this area."

According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization in their 2009 survey conducted in 40,153 households, the rate of access to an improved water source increased considerably between 2005 and 2009. However only 2.5 per cent of urban areas gets water from their homes. The rest of the population fetches water in streams or rivers.

Jackson Ndayizeye, a World Vision Burundi Water and Sanitation Health (WASH) specialist explains that the terrain around the school is not suitable for gravity-fed water systems and the water table level in the underground aquifer is very low. For these reasons, Jackson says it’s difficult to bring water access into the homes and school of Muyinga.

He says that rain water harvesting is a lasting solution. In rain harvesting, people place barrels to collect water when it rains and then boil the water. It’s exactly the solution the school needed to ease the stress on students for the meal programme.

“Thanks to World Vision’s water, now when we enter our classes and we are sure that nothing is going to interrupt us until meal time” Jean Marie rejoices.

For Burundi, three quarters of the year is rainy season. The dry season comes when children are on holidays. He mentions that World Vision is envisaging the use of pumping machines in order to find a solution to the issue of clean drinking water in the Muyinga locality.

Florence Niyonzima, the head mistress of Muyange primary school in Gashoho Area Development Programme (ADP) of that province says that it was difficult for her school to get water to cook food for the1,356 children without using the same children to collect water. Now that World Vision installed rain water harvesting tanks, significant changes are obvious.

“This water helped us much. Children were massively dropping out. Before we got these tanks, 110, [and] up to 120 children, were abandoning school. Now it is less than a half of that number who drop out. Absences have reduced sensibly, 300 absences were noted each month, now they are less than 50. The success has also increased; in 2010, 220 on 400 children of the first form classes did not succeed, in 2012 in the same classes only 89 on 412 children were obliged to redo their class.”  Esperance says

Five kilometres away in the same ADP is Muruta primary school. Gloriose Ngendakuriyo, the head mistress of that school, notes similar results.