Providing access to safe drinking water to poorest families in Jalboun

Jalboun village is one of the three targeted communities for EMPOWERS in Jenin governorate, Palestine, and is located twelve kilometres east of Jenin city. People there suffer from harsh living condition especially when it comes to access to adequate and safe water. The village lacks a local water source, and is not connected to a water supply network. Their only sources are harvested rainwater stored in cisterns during the short rainy months, and water purchased from private agricultural wells in the adjacent villages. As a result, the individual's share of water is 48 liters/day, while the projected minimum requirement of an individual is 70 L/d. Because of this bad water situation in Jalboun and in order to increase their access to safe drinking water, a decision was taken during the village stakeholder workshop to make their first pilot project to be implemented is the construction of household-level water harvesting cisterns. Therefore, a local water development committee was formed in the village to implement the pilot project.This committee together with the rest of the key stakeholders set the selection criteria for the beneficiaries of this pilot, giving a special focus on the poorest families in Jalboun who would otherwise be unable to construct their own cistern. The criteria for the targeted beneficiaries were:

• Socio-economic status: priority given to groups that were identified by the

  

  survey as households with no or irregular income, or those with low, but regular income.

• Households that do not have access to any sources of water supply.
• Families who did not benefit from previously funded projects in the village.
• Family size: priority given to families with large number of members.
• Multi - use: Besides water for drinking and cooking, households can make use of the extra water for irrigation (productive home gardens) or for their livestock.

Impacts of the pilot project:

• Access to safe drinking water was provided to eight

  

  families (~70 individuals)

• The storage capacity now available for the eight households has increased from zero to 500 cubic meters of water.
• By harvesting water, the families are saving money that would have been instead spent on purchasing water from tankers
• Besides the direct benefits, the local community were extremely satisfied with the project (EMPOWERS), and its approaches. It was the first time when they were given a chance to participate in every step of the process (i.e., from the data collection, through pilot selection, setting the beneficiary selection criteria, and actual implementation of the pilot.

Other families in Jalboun did satisfy the selection criteria but were not chosen for the construction of a cistern. One such case was that of Um Hamzeh.