A brief video featuring RVF’s ongoing work to bring safe drinking water to displaced families in Gaza by Shams Odeh and Small Footprint Films
Water scarcity in Gaza is a critical concern that endangers the life and health of vulnerable displaced children and their families. Obtaining water often requires lengthy and potentially dangerous journeys. Trucking alone cannot provide a sustainable solution. Community-based desalination systems offer a reliable and locally managed mechanism for delivering safe drinking water directly to affected populations.
Currently, RVF is the only organization providing community-based desalination systems for potable water at scale in Gaza. RVF’s desalination sites serve over 200,000 displaced individuals directly where they are sheltering, not at central locations requiring daily time-consuming journeys to fetch water. At each site RVF has formal agreements with community elders to be the honorary owners of the desalination system, which creates trust and order within the community. All maintenance and repair of the systems, the regular testing of water quality, and assisting with the distribution of potable water is carried out by RVF Gazan personnel under the direct auspices of the community leaders.
Prior to the current conflict, RVF was leading an international initiative with the support of a grant from the UAE Government to help address the water crisis in Gaza – where over 95% of Gaza’s water was unsafe to drink. The program would have provided 230,000 Gazan children and their teachers at 125 UNRWA schools have access to safe water for drinking and handwashing.
The project to provide safe water in Gaza follows the the introduction of two essential children’s vaccines in Gaza and the West Bank, rotavirus and pneumococcal vaccines, implemented by RVF in partnership with the Palestinian Ministry of Health and funded by the UAE and USAID.
Read more about RVF’s current projects here: https://rostropovich.org/en/news-updates/