Providing clean drinking water to a rural village in Senegal

Ndeugueut, Senegal, is so rural that it is only searchable online with the exact global coordinates. Located in the St. Louis region of northwest Senegal, approximately 400 people live there, and villagers traveled roughly 10 kilometers (6 miles) round trip to get drinking water, bringing back as much as they could carry on foot. According to a UNICEF and World Health Organization report, the struggle of villages like Ndeugueut is not uncommon — one in every three people worldwide lacks access to safe drinking water, which is often the culprit for preventable, deadly waterborne illnesses. In partnership with Delta Irrigation, Le Partenariat and Oshun, Valmont assisted with a strategy to conserve resources and improve life through the establishment of drinking water in Ndeugueut, which lacks electricity and other resources for a water system. Once the plan was in place, Valley provided materials to install a pump operated by an automated and autonomous solar energy system that extracts water from a well, transfers it to a purifier for filtering, and then to a water tank and distributors.

Delta Irrigation dug the well and installed the system, and Le Partenariat and Oshun aided Valley and Delta Irrigation as valued liaisons — identifying the needs of the rural village, helping with communication and logistics, and ensuring the project met government requirements. The estimated donation from Valmont for this project was $35,000. Through the collaborative effort, safe drinking water was flowing by October 2022, right in the center of the village at the school. Maintained by trained villagers, the system uses self-sustained solar power to produce approximately 24,000 liters (6,340 gallons) of filtered drinking water per day. When the water was turned on for the first time, the ear-to-ear smiles on the faces of the village’s schoolchildren were a strong sign that the new pump would improve lives for generations to come. Valmont and its partners plan to aid more rural areas with sustainable drinking water solutions in 2023.