Community Water Solutions
Saha Global
Solution Overview & Benefits
Saha Global (formerly Community Water Solutions) empowers women to launch sustainable water businesses. Saha trains women from rural villages how to launch simple water treatment centers that provide safe water to their community at a price that all can afford.
Instead of drilling wells, Saha Global brings students and young professionals from around the world to West Africa, where they build water treatment centers and train local women to run them. These businesses provide safe drinking water to the entire community, generate income for the women entrepreneurs who run them, and use local products.
Six Steps to Clean Drinking Water
1. Community Engagement: Saha works with local governments to identify villages that rely solely on contaminated surface water sources. Local leaders nominate two to five women to become Saha entrepreneurs.
2. Startup Toolkit: We provide each business with locally available materials to build a water treatment center in the village, including a 1,000- liter Polytank, a metal Polytank stand, and three blue 200-liter drums.
3. Women’s Training: Women learn to treat the water from contaminated sources to make it safe to drink and to run the water treatment center, including pricing, frequency of treatment, and social marketing.
4. Community Education: Saha visits every household in the village to educate families about clean water and distribute safe storage containers (SSCs) that prevent water re-contamination in the home.
5. Water Treatment: Women entrepreneurs fetch dirty water from the dugout, fill up the drums, and treat the water with aluminum sulfate that causes sediments to settle to the bottom of the drums, leaving the water clear. They transfer the clear water into the Polytank where they disinfect it with chlorine. They sell the treated water for a price that everyone in the village can afford. Villagers then store the treated water in SSCs.
6. Customer Care: Women entrepreneurs receive ongoing mentoring from Saha. We monitor water quality and consumption in the village for a minimum of 10 years.
History & Development
Saha Global is a non-for-profit social enterprise that partners with rural communities in developing countries to establish sustainable water treatment businesses. These businesses are owned and operated by the communities that they serve, and use simple, affordable technologies to enable the treatment, distribution, and storage of clean, safe drinking water.
The maintenance and operation of these water treatment businesses is funded by revenue from the sale of drinking water, while the capital and training necessary to establish them is generated from Saha Global fellowship program.
Saha Global is currently working in 55 communities in the Northern Region of Ghana. There are currently 434 Saha clean water businesses which serve 131,497 people and are fraction of cost of drilling a borehole or well.
The word “Saha” means opportunity in Dagboni, which is the local language spoken in Northern Region Ghana.
Availability
- Publicly available: yes
- Countries where available: Ghana
- Countries where spare parts can be purchased: Ghana
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