Home \ Project News \ Improving Water, Hygiene and Sanitation Situation in Butuo
Butuo Country is located in southeastern Sichuan Liangshan Prefecture, which covers an area of 1685 square kilometers, 2385 meters above sea level. Butuo is an alpine mountain farming and animal husbandry County. The County is inhabited by the Yi, Han, Tibetan, Hui, Miao and a dozen other ethnic groups. The Yi population accounts for 94% of the total population. Due to the lack of adequate means to store water during periods with abundant rainfall for times of low precipitation, situations like past years droughts are bringing an extra burden to the people.
Bori Village, Huolie is located in the southeast part of Butuo County, near the township government. It is composed of 4 natural villages, with a population of 1,465 people. Its main food crops are buckwheat, oats and potatoes. It is located on the cold highland area, averaging over 2,500 meters above sea level.
Many villagers in Butuo County do not have garbage pools and public toilets. Most of the villagers use open space for relieving themselves due to lack of toilets. This exposes people to airborne and water borne diseases. Some villagers do not pay attention to personal hygiene, reason being that they might be lacking knowledge on personal health and hygiene. Most of the local people are living in terrible poverty. One of the schools, Eqing Primary School is short of classrooms and teacher living quarters. The houses are broken and the staff and children face a problem in drinking water. There is much inconvenience due to lack of constant water supplies and this is affecting the proper running of the school.
The staff of Atlas Copco launched the “water for all” charity organizations in Sweden in 1984, which aims at providing clean drinking water to developing countries. And this project formally entered into China in 2014. Atlas Copco worked 3 years with Plan International to do the Water for all project in Gansu and Shaanxi, this year they want to include Liangshan.
In 2016, Atlas Copco funded Humana People to People through China Charities Aid Foundation for Children, to implement a Community Development project in Butuo County. The grant money is raised from the employees, and then the company matches 2:1, so for every 1 RMB given by staff, the company adds 2 RMB. The staff from Atlas Copco will come 2 times in the project year to check and film the project.
The period of the program is from the 1st of April 2016 to the 31st of March 2017.The CD Huolie (Community Development) program intends to address water, health, hygiene and sanitation problems within the community. The program is focused on building the capacity and health knowledge of the community. The program will also focus on improving nutrition knowledge within the families. The program will be organized in 5 village action groups, each covering 25-35 households. The villagers will then elect 2-3 committee members to be responsible for the running of the groups. In this way it will be possible to reach out to each household with training and actions. The project will also establish 8 health and hygiene clubs (a club for each class) which will increase health, hygiene and nutrition knowledge. The project is expected to benefit 145 households with a total of 725 villagers, 300 students and 11 teachers. To curb the water problem the project will build 1 water cistern and piping and install inexpensive ceramic water filtration systems in the village. The project will also build 2 public toilets to help solve the problem of villagers relieving themselves in the open. At Eqing Primary school the project will construct 1 hand washing facility and 1 hot shower water heater. In addition to this the project will establish 1 hygiene and nutrition village training room where the village groups will be provided training in hygiene, sanitation and nutrition.
