{"id":16711,"date":"2016-09-27T17:23:56","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T15:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ferrovial.com\/blog\/en\/?p=16711"},"modified":"2025-12-12T00:05:57","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:05:57","slug":"20-litres-of-water-on-their-heads-the-daily-routine-of-the-women-of-uganda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ferrovial.com\/blog\/en\/2016\/09\/20-litres-of-water-on-their-heads-the-daily-routine-of-the-women-of-uganda\/","title":{"rendered":"20 litres of water on their heads. The daily routine of the women of Uganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

The two weeks between 4 and 18 April were a turning point<\/strong> not only in my career, but also in my personal life. Thanks to Ferrovial\u2019s corporate volunteering programm<\/a>e, along with other company employees I had the opportunity to learn about and support the work that the NGO Plan International Uganda<\/a> is performing in this country and more specifically the interventions carried out in the districts of Kamuli and Buyende.<\/p>\n

The collaboration between Ferrovial and Plan International is carried out within the framework of Ferrovial\u2019s Social Infrastructures<\/em> programme<\/a>, the vehicle for international cooperation in water and sanitation-related projects. In the case of the project I visited the goal is to improve access to high quality potable water in 15 rural communities in the Buyende district<\/a>, which will benefit more than 13,000 people<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"water<\/a><\/p>\n

Access to services as basic as electric power and healthy water is still only a dream in many rural areas of Uganda. Our mission as volunteers was to support the Plan NGO\u2019s project<\/strong>, providing proposals for improvement in terms of water quality, location, communication\/diffusion behaviour change and innovation from an external point of view<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

As an expert in relations with third parties in projects in which Ferrovial has a presence in London, one of the main concerns that I faced before starting this adventure, was whether my experience in the UK would be transferable to a so different from London<\/strong> place as is Uganda.<\/p>\n

During the first week, through visits to the beneficiary communities, we held conversations with the NGO, local authorities and members of water boards and visited previously constructed and operating wells, both successful ones and others not so successful… We volunteers were given first-hand insight into the base conditions and the main challenges to be overcome to enable implementation of the project. This enabled us to understand the backdrop of statistics<\/strong> as shocking as the following:<\/p>\n