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Our Pilot Project at Aleta Chuko
Background – Pilot Area: Aleta Chuko
• This area is 95% village where people live in huts.
• People in this area are mostly farmers who grow cash crop plants.
• If they are not farmers, they are cattle breeders.
• A small slum town is built around an international highway that
connects Moyale to Addis Ababa which serves as a trade path.
• Coffee, pineapples and a tropical plant called Khat are commonly harvested for export from this place.
• There are few water stations in this region and each one is built to serve up to 27,000 people.
• Mothers, boys, and girls have to walk for 40 minutes, sometimes for
hours to get to the nearby water station, river, pond, springs, or well.
• There are usually long lines so they spend from 3-5 hours before they get any water.
Pilot Activities
As a social enterprise, Vital Water Purifier conducted a pilot project between 1st August, 2023 and 31st of October, 2023 to distribute water filters at a small village town called Aleta Chuko with a population of not more than 280,000 people. We have reached 313 village homes and brought water access to 1,878 rural people so far. The communities we met in the village areas in southern Ethiopia where we completed a pilot project, used dirt water from wells, rivers, and streams for everyday use. Their children used to suffer from water-borne diseases like Cholera and typhoid fever. Sometimes this leads to infant mortality. Parents live with belly aches and worms for years. After learning about our solution, many of our beneficiaries speak highly of our intervention and they testify that they feel much healthier and they say it saved them money. Now they don’t have to walk for hours to get water from crowded water stations. They can filter the water they get from their vicinity using the water filters they bought from us.
Challenges
Our enterprise conducted a successful pilot project in the last 3 months. We have sold 313 water filters. This encourages us to keep moving forward and execute our proposed plans in the coming years as well. Although planning on paper and executing on the ground may deviate due to various factors, we were able to adapt through them to bring the outcomes that we targeted. One of the challenges was weather conditions in the pilot region. It was rainy most of the day as it was winter season during that time of the year. The other challenge was until end of September it was not particularly favorable season for majority merchant and framer population as they become short of money before the coffee sales season. If these challenges were met, our sales would have been twice more than what we sold already.
NEXT STEPS:
What we have in our pipeline.
We are working to scale our social enterprise!
We believe many people in Ethiopia need this solution. Our intent is to reach as many people as possible.
In order to make this vision a reality, we are partnering with reputable organizations like the D-prize and
many more.
In the next five years, our goal is to reach 150,000 homes which corresponds to an impact nearing
1 million people. As we scale our business, we aim to reach the entire 11 regions of Ethiopia and become
the largest water filter distributor in Ethiopia by 2028.
Help Us Reach More people
We are working hard to get this intervention to 9000 more people by the end of 2024 and we are raising $100,000 for that. During this journey, we learned that the majority of Ethiopians struggle with a lack of access to clean water and they need such an intervention on a larger scale. We’re open for grants and equity investments. So we invite you to join us today and contribute to the vision of unlocking water access for millions of Ethiopians.
