Water & Chimpanzee Conservation Project
The Hoima District is a remote and very impoverished rural region of Uganda (6hrs west of Kampala). In the Hoima District, BridgIT’s projects include an animal conservation element. BridgIT Water partners with the Bulindi Chimpanzee & Community Project (BCCP), a grassroots organisation, to address urgent threats to wild chimpanzees living in unprotected habitats alongside rural farmers.
There are two main objectives for this project – humans and chimpanzees are both affected. The sharing of water sources by human populations and chimpanzees poses a threat to chimpanzees; c. 300 chimpanzees survive in small, unprotected forest fragments owned by village households and primarily children who have to encounter them to access the water source.
This project not only allows villagers access to a safe water supply without exposure to preventable water-borne diseases such as dysentery, cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea while collecting unsafe, contaminated water from forest streams where they risk potentially dangerous encounters with the chimpanzees but also helps to conserve the chimpanzee populations.
The project scope involves constructing 2 hand-drilled boreholes to provide safe and clean water to 2 rural villages in the Hoima District of Uganda. The borehole construction method involves the newly acquired Village Drill, innovative manual borehole drilling equipment to provide clean water in rural communities. The project activity involves siting, manual drilling and construction of bore headworks, equipping with a hand pump, and Water User Committees’ training on sustainability
strategies at each of the beneficiary villages.