UN Foundation’s Global Debates program challenges high school students from around the world to think critically about pressing global issues. This spring they will focus their discussions and actions on the adaptations necessary to combat climate change. With the UN’s completion of climate negotiations last December, it is more important than ever to uphold a global push for international agreement to combat climate change.

The Santee Education Complex in Los Angeles will host two public debates on this critical topic, April 16, at 10:00 am and 1:45 pm in the school Auditorium. Teams of two will argue each side of the debate topic which challenges students to take a stand on the following: “Countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) should provide significantly increased aid to developing countries for the specific purpose of climate change adaptation.” Debates will be videotaped and submitted to the United Nations Foundation. The Santee High Debate Team has won the debate competition two years in a row. This year, Mayor Villaraigosa is invited, as well as LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia, LA City Council Member Jan Perry, and activists from local environmental groups.

As a result of their participation in the Global Debates, Santee Education Complex will be highlighted throughout the UN Foundation website and be eligible to win prizes that include a $2,000 UN Foundation school grant and a trip to the Open Society Institute’s Youth Forum in the Netherlands.

BACKGROUND
Since their inception, the UN Foundation Global Debates have been held in more than 90 countries. From Moldova and South Africa to Los Angeles and Mississippi, this program continues to grow, educating and activating new communities of students and teachers from around the world. As Ambassador Susan Rice and other UN leaders remind us, young people are ready to serve and take action. By engaging students and their teachers on issues of poverty reduction, global health, climate change and more, the UN Foundation is inspiring young people to be a positive force for change in the world.

Click here for more information.

The United Nations Foundation is an advocate for the UN and a platform for connecting people, ideas, and resources to help the United Nations solve global problems.

Guest contributor Arjen van der Wal is an environmentalist and drilling expert at Practica Foundation, an Akvo support partner. Here he describes the opportunities possible when people are trained to drill wells.

Say you want to extract water from the ground, because you have had enough of carrying water around for six hours a day, and have more useful things to do with your time. And say you live in a region where the ground water is of good quality, and the soil consists of sand or clay. Then you might want to have a borehole, preferably near your house, where you can get nice, clean, safe water, without walking too far. What are your options?

Above: Manually drilling a borehole with the sludging technique

Up to now, drilling boreholes involved large and expensive machines, which get the job done quickly and efficiently. Machine drilled wells are very high in quality, but also very expensive. The cost of a machine drilled well varies between countries and will generally be in the range of $5,000 to $15,000 for a 30-meter deep well. Unfortunately, this is so expensive that it is unreachable for almost all poor communities, and needs large subsidies to get done at all. And if large subsidies are needed, it does not scale. But a silent revolution to change all this is underway, and it is called manual drilling.

MANUAL DRILLING

Manual drilling does away with big trucks with expensive machinary, and depends entirely on hand-powered equipment and lots of skill. If you don’t have money, you have to be smart! Costs of 30-metre deep wells vary from about $100 to $2,500, depending on geology, country and application (small scale irrigation wells or high quality community wells for potable water). See here andhere for earlier blogs on the subject.

Manual drilling itself already exists for hundreds of years, but use by larger organisations has been limited, as the quality of the wells was often questioned. This is now rapidly changing, with large organisations such as Unicef embracing manual drilling as part of their technology portfolio. In the field of water supply, this is no less than revolutionary.

Manual drilling with the Percussion technique

TRAINING, TRAINING, TRAINING

The most important thing to get manual drilling of the ground in a professional way in a region is training. In a joint effort, the DutchPRACTICA Foundation, UNICEF, and US-based Enterprise Works/Vita have developed a toolkit for African countries wishing to embark on the professionalisation of manual drilling. This toolkit includes technical notes, technical manuals, advocacy materials, mapping of suitable areas for manual drilling, case studies, and implementation and training manuals. The works. With this material, the local private sector can take up manual drilling, so they can respond to the ever-increasing demand for safe water in rural areas.

Our experience at PRACTICA has been that with the right training of manual drilling teams, wells of good quality can be drilled. In Chad for example, UNICEF and PRACTICA are training 43 manual drilling enterprises, quality controllers and pump repairman, ultimately producing over 500 wells for rural communities (you can find a case study on this initiative on our website).

READ AND SEE MORE

A lot of supporting material is and will come available in the next few months, supporting this initiative. You can read the 5 technical notes, or you can watch the 12 minute film “Professionalizing the manual drilling sector in Africa”. You can also visit the PRACTICA website in July 2010, when we expect to publish Technical manuals on the manual drilling techniques: Jetting, Augering, Sludging and Manual Percussion and an update of the manual: “Understanding Groundwater & Wells in manual drilling”. Explore and make this revolution happen!

Author: Arjen van der Wal, Practica Foundation. Practica Foundation is a partner of Akvo – you can view Practica projects online here. For more low-cost water and sanitation solutions, please visit Akvopedia.

It was my great honour yesterday to walk with Dutch schoolchildren, who were raising awareness of global water issues and raising hard cash to fund water and sanitation projects through Akvo.

I was with Luuk in Eindhoven, home of Philips (and the compact disc!). Peter and Kathelyne were at Katwijk, on the Dutch coast. Mark Westra was in the Eastern city of Arnhem.

We’ve described the format of Walking for Water already, and the organisations behind it (it’s led by Aqua for All). It’s a concept that Live Earth is now helping us extend globally.

You can see the projects that the kids were funding here on the Walking for Water Project page, in Akvo.

Spending time with kids always fascinates me — they’re clear cut, unladen with the sentimentality that adults have towards poverty and development. They’re not interested in symbolism and really can’t be fed propaganda like adult campaigners can — they’ll do it their way. Luuk and I had huge fun walking with the 35-strong Eindhoven Internationale School, led by the wonderful Fiona Knol. One of nine schools on the Eindhoven walk, her kids were great — they’d raised more than €1,500. This was to be tripled by corporate and institutional funders. Overall, the Eindhoven event alone raised more than €25,000.

On Thursday night, it was announced that the Dutch walks were on track to raise €1.2 million ($1.6 million) in total. We’ll do a wrap-up blog to set out what was raised where, next week, along with further interviews with people involved, to help organisers elsewhere in the world harness this really powerful, really fun way to educate kids and raise money for water and sanitation projects.

Mark Charmer is co-founder of Akvo.