Foos Yussuf Jama proudly leads community leaders and a NAPAD team in a walk around the concrete perimeter fence that secures the village borehole and the solar-powered water pumping system. Her beautiful smile betrays the joy in her as she narrates how the community is progressing in realizing its dream of accessing adequate, affordable and safe water.
“4 years ago, we had no water source for our people. We hired water boozers to track water from Landheer village 19 km away. This was expensive for our poor households who could only afford to buy about six 20l jerrycans in a week at $ 0.4 per 20l jerrycan. This was not adequate for domestic use and other hygiene purposes. Our livestock had to be moved to surrounding villages more than 19 Km away for watering when our barkads dried up. This more often than not caused conflicts over the water points and grazing land”.
Foos Yussuf Jama a mother of nine children was elected out of ten candidates to be the community leader of Huulkujir village located 22Km from Abudwak town in Somalia. This is unusual in a predominantly patriarchal community.
“I was surprised when community elders, religious leaders and respected community members selected me as their chairperson.”, mama Foos says with a chuckle
Mama Foos with her team of leaders settled on having a sustainable source of water for the Huulkujir residents as their priority. They reached out to various donors but due to limited resources from development partners, no donor had the resources to develop all the required water infrastructures. In 2019 an NGO supported the community to drill a borehole but had no money to provide power to pump the water or construct necessary water infrastructures. Water for the community was now so near yet too deep to be of use by the residents.
In 2020, NAPAD through financing from the Somali Humanitarian Fund installed a solar water pumping system at the Huulkujir borehole. This enabled the pumping of the water from the deep borehole to an old tank and a standpipe where the community and the livestock access the much-needed water.
We now have water in our village, this is a dream come true, says Mama Foos as she walks to the surface old steel water tank. We now pay only $ 0.1 for a 20l jerrycan and the households can afford more than four 20l jerrycans, enough for domestic and hygiene use”.
As the adage goes ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’, Mama Foos is steadily leading the community of Huulkujir in reaping the many benefits of having access to adequate, affordable and safe water.
“ Our women and girls will no longer spend time queuing to fetch water, our men and boys will no longer fight with neighbours for livestock water.”, Mama Foos reports.
Hers has been a journey with many stopovers which is now half gone. Drilling of the borehole was the first step but lack of a source of power to pump the water halted the journey. Installation of a solar water pumping system provided the water at the borehole, but the new residents have to walk to the borehole which is more than 500m from the households.
She says she is grateful to the community members who mobilized resources to construct the concrete perimeter wall to secure the solar pumping system. She enumerates steps ahead as construction of an elevated water tank and water pipe network to the village and individual homesteads. As she thanks the community and NAPAD team for the progress so far, the request for assistance to complete the remaining infrastructures to tapped water at the homesteads.
When asked about her vision for the village she said, “I am working towards achieving Huulkujir community having piped water to each Household and sufficient water for the villages, Huulkujir community with an alternative source of livelihoods other than livestock keeping, young girls and boys access education and a community that leaves together peacefully”.