Water for South Sudan, Inc.

WFSS aims to help the people of South Sudan improve their lives by providing access to clean, safe water. WFSS follows this guiding principle: the ethical and moral way to create lasting change is to respect and empower each individual's capacity to transform their own lives. WFSS is committed to creating hope and building initiative alongside the people it serves. WFSS's work is in alignment with Sustainable Development Goal #6, Clean Water and Sanitation.

WFSS has always engaged the local community in its work. WFSS works with village and county leaders to determine where wells are needed. The wells built by WFSS become the property of the village. Each community forms a committee and appoints an individual to manage the well. Community members pay this manager to make necessary arrangements for repairs. A few hallmarks of WFSS's process are training villagers in making minor repairs, providing resources for parts, and connecting villages to supply chains.

WFSS works in the Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan. This region is very rural. WFSS is striving to provide every village in the region with access to safe water. WFSS has researched many types of water systems to determine the most efficient way to provide isolated villages with fresh water. Due to the climate, terrain, and environment, drilling wells is still the best option where WFSS works. Each WFSS well serves approximately 650 to 750, depending on the size of the village.

WFSS drills wells that draw water from an underground aquifer. The aquifer is 10,000 years old, and WFSS views it as a precious resource that must be protected. The aquifer is naturally replenished during the rainy season.

WFSS's well drilling process includes sealing each well and ensuring that all wells are fenced, safeguarding the aquifer. In addition, WFSS provides hygiene education to ensure that villagers know how to protect the well and therefore the aquifer.

Currently, WFSS provides hygiene education in every village where we work. Our team in South Sudan is actively working to build latrines in a school near Wau. Women and girls are most impacted when they don't have access to sanitation facilities. Openly defecation in the bush can be potentially dangerous, and inconvenient during menstrual cycles. When WFSS drills a well, girls in the surrounding area can go to school. The installation of a latrine at a school would therefore grant girls the privacy and safety they need, and also allows them to continue attending school even during menstruation.

WFSS's strategy for providing access to safe water is to drill boreholes in isolated villages in the Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan. There are still many villages in need of a well and villages with one well could use another. Each well serves approximately 650 to 750 people.

Prior to drilling a well, the WFSS team conducts an assessment to determine that the village is in need of a well, that there is access to water in the area, and where the best location is for the well. Once location is determined, the WFSS team enlists villagers in preparing for the new well. Often they must clear brush and trees to create a roadway for the equipment to get through.

WFSS's strategy for Hygiene Education is to “train the trainer." WFSS offers hygiene education in every village where it drills a new well or rehabilitates an older well. In each village eight representatives, four men and four women, are trained and then go out to teach the rest of the community. The WFSS hygiene education team works with village representatives to identify the needs in their community. Education is then focused on those specific needs, such as personal hygiene, preventing the spread of disease, and barriers to stop the transmission of disease.

WFSS's strategy for sanitation is to build latrines in a school. WFSS completed its first latrine project during the 2017-18 drilling season at the Zogolona Primary School serving 800 students and teachers.

WFSS drilled its first well in 2005, and as of March 16, 2021, WFSS has drilled 460 wells serving more than 300,000 people. Building upon our success in drilling wells, during the 2013-2014 drilling season WFSS began hygiene education, teaching villagers how to protect the well and to prevent the spread of disease. To date, WFSS has provided hygiene training to 1,584 people in 198 villages, who then train the rest of their communities in best hygiene practices. In 2017, WFSS launched its new rehabilitation team to repair and upgrade cement platforms on its older wells. Thirty-one wells were rehabilitated and hygiene education was conducted in villages where wells were rehabbed.

WFSS founder Salva Dut, and the Country Director and Associate Country Director are all former “Lost Boys" who came to the US as refugees. They took advantage of the opportunities they had to be educated. However, they all chose to return to South Sudan to help rebuild their homeland, and each has dual citizenship. Other managers and the seasonal drilling, hygiene, and rehab teams are all hired locally in South Sudan or neighboring countries.

Because our leadership local to the area, our team knows the people, the customs, and the language of those WFSS serves. They are able to navigate the country with more familiarity and insight. . WFSS employees gain trust by communicating with regional and local leaders. An integral piece of the WFSS process is to engage the community and work with them rather than come in with a top-down approach.

Training is a priority for key leaders and staff in South Sudan. WFSS is helping to shape a skilled workforce in South Sudan. Last year, WFSS instituted the South Sudan Leadership Council, comprised of our six managers in South Sudan. The Leadership Council has weekly calls with the Executive Director and Director of Operations in the US. This process has proven to be an effective management strategy. The creation of the Leadership Council has given the employees in South Sudan more ownership of their work, and the weekly calls have provided a forum for discussion, questions, and troubleshooting as needed to track the progress of the work in South Sudan.

Water for South Sudan has installed more than 460 wells in remote, rural villages in South Sudan, serving over 300,000 people with access to fresh, clean water every day. Each well provides approximately 7,650 liters of water per day; using the 400 wells-to-date metric, Water for South Sudan's wells provide more than 3,496,050‬ liters of clean water per day.

Since 2014, WFSS has provided hygiene training to 2,640 representatives in 330 villages, who are tasked to train the rest of their communities in best hygiene practices. The hygiene training program has impacted over 100,000 people to date.

During the 2017 drilling season, WFSS launched its rehabilitation team. To date, our rehab team has revisited 119 early WFSS wells to upgrade eroded cement platforms to a new design standard developed by WFSS in 2016.

WFSS also repairs wells originally installed by other organizations. WFSS does this in whenever wells are encountered on the road in need of repair. Since we began accounting for these several years ago, our team has repaired 167 wells.

WFSS expects to drill up to 40 new wells and rehab 50 existing wells each season, and to provide approximately 900 hygiene education training programs. With each well serving an average of 750 people, WFSS estimates that its projects will affect more than 67,500 people each season.

As part of its plan to become fully engaged in the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector with a sanitation project, WFSS completed the construction of a latrine at the Zogolona Primary School in Wau, South Sudan, in June 2018. The new latrine serves the school's 800 students.