Our Mission

The Healthy Hands Initiative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based out of UNC Chapel Hill. We seek to provide sustainable clean water solutions to underserved families and students—initially in the Bokaro district of northeast India—in order to reduce the rates of prevalent, preventable diseases and work towards promoting social welfare and healthcare in our targeted areas.

HELPING THOSE IN NEED

The Healthy Hands Initiative solution is centered around installing Afridev handpumps across several Bokaro district villages and monitoring their maintenance over a five-to-ten-year period with the help of our community partner, Jan Chetna Manch Bokaro. Particular focus will be given to the boring and casing process during installation, since our URCT team found strong evidence that insufficiently deep boring and low-quality casing decrease handpump durability. The direct beneficiaries of our first handpump project, scheduled for December 2020, are 30 households (with an average of two men, two women, and two children per household). Based on our prior fieldwork and our communications with our partner, we are confident that our efforts will effectively tackle the prevalence of waterborne illnesses in the Bokaro district. We will ensure this by maintaining contact with locals to collect personal accounts of how the new pumps have influenced their health and quality of life. Healthy Hands Initiative aims not only to bring the cost-efficient, community-specific, and sustainable clean water solutions to underserved villages, but also to create benchmark models on which our nonprofit and other local community programs can build.

“Water-related disease is responsible for 80 percent of all illnesses, deaths in the developing world”

Water scarcity continues to threaten the health and safety of over 2.7 billion people a year. Lack of reliable and equitable access to clean drinking water is linked to a higher prevalence of waterborne illnesses. In India, diarrheal disease constitutes over 90% of deaths attributed to inadequate water access. Although government programs like Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 Swachh Bharat (“Clean India”) campaign and the Jharkhand Chief Minister’s 2018 Open Defecation Free efforts have focused on eliminating open defecation in India, which remains a major contributor to diarrheal disease, little attention and funding has been given to other, perhaps more fundamental, causes.

This past year, part of our team was able to investigate problems regarding social sanitation in several villages in the Bokaro district up close through an Undergraduate Research Consultant Team (URCT) grant. The project revealed that the few existing public hand pumps in these communities often run dry due to low-quality implementation coupled with overuse and low water levels during the dry season. Desperate local men, women and children thus resort to drinking directly from nearby ponds and streams, contributing to high rates of diarrheal disease in the area. Our team has seen firsthand the despair of locals who felt ignored and helpless and is compelled to address this injustice by working to resolve sources of illness and death at a fundamental level and lay a foundation for stronger, healthier communities in the Bokaro district.

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