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UNHCR's Clean Water Program enables refugees to collect, store, and drink safe and clean water. Learn more about our Water Program now!



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Stories From The Field

Hassan, Ethiopia

Hassan, Ethiopia

"We had no alternatives. As long as it was liquid, the quality and colour of the water was not important to us."

On a dusty plain outside the town of Kebri Beyah in Ethiopia, there are piles of little stones. They mark the graves of children - mostly children under the age of five who died of cholera and other waterborne diseases. Back in 2005, the people of Kebri Beyah, many of them impoverished Somali refugees, were burying up to one hundred of their children every month.

Says Kebri Beyah resident, Hassan Mahmoud Mohammed, the women once had to walk miles every day to fetch water. They had little choice but to draw it from still, muddy pools where animals bathed, drank and died. It teemed with invisible pathogens like cholera, dysentery, intestinal worms and the larvae of malarial mosquitoes.

"We had no alternatives back then," says Hassan Mahmoud. "As long as it was liquid, the quality and colour of the water was not important to us."

In 2005, UNHCR implemented a major Water Project in Kebri Beyahto address the acute water shortage. The project involved the sinking of a 200 metre bore and the construction of a series of pipes, pumps and reservoirs to transport and store the water safely. Today, clean water flows from 24 solidly built water points and tap stands around the town and nearby refugee camps. There is enough water for washing, so hygiene has improved. The women no longer spend their days trekking across the plains and their daughters have time to go to school. Best of all, cholera has disappeared, diarrhoea has been reduced and infant deaths in Kebri Beyah have dropped dramatically.