Development Program and Emergency Services
Our staff have been engaged in humanitarian assistance and emergency relief interventions in the developing countries for more than 25 years now. Our focus has been mainly in the provision of clean water, mostly through the development of groundwater and surface water resources and the promotions of good hygiene and environmental sanitation practices in rural and peri-urban communities and refugee camps.
Over the years, we have successfully implemented both large and small-scale community water supply and hygiene and sanitation promotion projects in some of the most inaccessible regions and communities in the world; ranging from multi-million dollar funded projects to small projects of a few hundreds of thousand dollars. As such, our team is very knowledgeable of the personnel and logistics requirements for the efficient and successful implementation of these projects at the minimum possible cost under varied environmental ad terrain conditions.
Our clean water supply activities includes the development of groundwater resources through drilled and hand-dug well construction and the damming and filtering of surface water resources. Depending on the yields and distances of the wells from the beneficiary communities, they may be equipped with submersible systems that will pump the water into overhead tanks for onwards distribution to the communities. The lower yielding wells will mostly be equipped with village level operation and maintenance pumps at source. Our dammed surface water sources will after filtering be pumped into overhead tanks for distribution to the beneficiaries through gravity flow systems. To this end, our staff have designed several piped-water systems.
Our hygiene and environmental sanitation activities include the development and implementation of hygiene and sanitation education activities and the construction of sanitation facilities; all appropriately tailored according to the cultural-settings and religious beliefs of the recipient communities. As such our activities in this arena have consistently resulted in significant positive changes in the attitude of the beneficiaries. Of interest, we have in recent years used the Community-Led Total Sanitation approach to enhance the communities’ understanding and need for improved personal and domestic hygiene practices and also environmental sanitation. MEK’s humanitarian assistance and emergency relief activities are usually preceded by community animation and sensitization activities to ensure the communities’ full involvement in project implementation and to guarantee that the communities’ will assume full ownership of the facilities after completion. We believe that these project inception activities will lead to the sustainable management of the facilities after project completion thereby ensuring their long-term sustainability.
We have also developed numerous in-house community assessment tools that help us to pre-determine capacity gaps in each beneficiary communities’ ability to effectively manage the water systems and sanitation facilities. As such, unlike most of our peers, MEK has been able to complete the relevant trainings required by each beneficiary community to ensure the long-term management of the facilities by the end date of project implementation.
