Cape Town - With water scarcity remaining a challenge, 30 young aspiring water champions from across the Province on Wednesday completed the virtual Kusini Water Champions boot camp.
The aspiring champs gained technical water skills and training to help them set up and eventually run their own water kiosks in their communities.
Kusini Water founder Murendeni Mafumo said: “Access to clean water and sanitation remains a priority and this programme allows us to partner with young people from diverse communities and share critical skills. It also gives them a head start to create long-term sustainable solutions to water challenges in their communities.”
Kusini Water Champions is a programme aimed at young people between the ages of 18 and 25, primarily unemployed women, who will be given technical training to gain water technical skills and National Qualifications Framework accreditation in the basics of water technology and treatment.
Mafumo said: “Kusini Water’s ultimate goal is to improve economic participation by training the aspiring water champions to run and own water kiosk businesses in their communities. By the end of 2023, over 165 young people between the ages of 18 and 25 will have gone through the training.”
Over the past six years since the programme was launched, seven new kiosks have been developed and currently supply safe, clean water to communities while 90 South Africans have been trained, creating 22 new jobs in various communities.
The programme arrived in the Western Cape this month. The participating water champions finished the three-day virtual boot camp yesterday and will continue the skills development programme in person in Stellenbosch from May 8 until May 10.
Dakalo Nengudza, a water champion, said: “The problem we are facing is water quality issues. We have learnt to identify this problem and bring solutions to it. Therefore, we are geared up to go out there and implement those solutions.”
Sanele Malongwe, another water champion, added that they not only learnt about the water technicalities of water purification but about the whole problem itself and how water is a scarcity in the world.
Kusini water is a social enterprise that builds water treatment systems from nanotechnology and locally sourced macadamia nutshells, to bring clean, safe drinking water to people in rural, peri-urban and informal settlements.