Wema, Kenya

The Wema Children’s Center

The Wema Children’s Centre and Highway Academy is an orphanage and school located in Bukembe Village, Bungoma, Kenya.  It is home to over 200 orphans and over 300 local school children.  The greater Bukembe Village registers about 5,000 people.  In 2016, EWB-Chicagoland Professional Chapter established a program through the Engineering Service Corps to address a dire water quality issue which was giving the children typhoid.  The drought in Kenya has forced them to continue using the water thus waterborne illness became a recurring public health issue.  CPC designed and implemented a pressurized water filtration unit and a chlorinator to address the problem in March 2017.  Following up in September 2017, the CPC team was excited to hear that Teresa Wati and Stephen Juma, Wema’s directors, have reported that since commissioning, they have seen a huge improvement in the public health of the area.  With this success came requests for connections to the clean water and the CPC team identified many other areas of need.  This has spurred the team to submit an International Community Partnership application to EWB-USA to address other needs such as obtaining reliable energy to power the water pumps, increase in water storage capacity, water system expansion consulting, development consulting, and other needs.

CPC recently returned from Wema in June 2022, which was the first trip since April 2019. The next planned trip was to be the following fall in  2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to all travel plans until further notice from EWB-USA. A positive out of the pandemic is it allowed for very efficient design coordination and allowed the team to conduct multiple meetings per week while remote connection was very popular for many months. The team took advantage of the opportunity and completed the design of the new bathroom and wastewater treatment, solar array and solar pump design, and community-side water system improvements. Once March 2021 began, the team began remote implementation of all of these projects which finally started to come to a close in May 2022 after many construction corrections.

Finally after more than two years of the pandemic, EWB-USA began clearing chapters to travel again and Kenya was one of the first countries to be cleared for travel again. It began to be an emotional rollercoaster as the delta and omicron variants caused EWB-USA to stop travel again even after lifting the ban. This made it very difficult to plan a trip, but the Wema team was recently able to travel again in June 2022 where the team closed out the bathroom, solar pump, and water projects. As of July 20, 2022, the team received a positive report from Stephen and Teresa that the solar pump is in good working order, the water is running, the water quality is good, the water treatment plan implemented in 2017 is working again, and the team received video of the water running from the showers at the bathroom.

The team will complete the post trip reports in mid-August and design of Phase 2 of the program will begin in September 2022. Phase 2 projects include:

-        Design the girls’ bathroom

-        Design the water kiosk tower

-        Planning and design projects for the site drainage, additional rainwater tanks, and groundwater infiltration

-        Phase 2 design of the water system expansion on the community side

-        Study the effects of the phase 1 implementation of the water system expansion

-        Water treatment plant upgrades and expansion

-        Solar system expansion to start powering the Wema campus

-        Design of 2nd soak pit

-        … and more!

Want to volunteer and become part of the Wema team? Contact Alan Phelps

From 2019:

CPC last traveled to Wema in April 2019. The trip consisted of an enhanced assessment where essential partnerships were established with EWB-Kenya, Water Mission, and with several individuals who could potentially benefit the work if necessary. Assessments were conducted for all projects, including solar power, water system expansion, rainwater harvesting, and new bathrooms. During the trip, CPC installed a pilot rainwater harvesting system which has been serving as a gauge to understand the use of rainwater in the community and will ultimately drive the design of the remaining rainwater harvesting systems.

From 2019-2020, the team has identified Phase 1 to be implemented in 2020. Efforts toward fundraising have sharply increased and continue to require volunteer support.

The future of the Wema program is to provide water system enhancements to the Market school, likely to be implemented by 2021, or sooner.

This is a truly dynamic partnership that continues to grow and inspire EWB volunteers. For more information and information on volunteering opportunities, contact Alan Phelps.