Update on Kawangware Biodigester Ablution Block and Community Kitchen, August 2011

We’ve made a lot of progress on the project at the Kabiro Human Development Project (KHDP). When KWENCH first proposed the project to the Finnish Embassy in Nairobi, we envisioned a project with a single, ground floor that would contain both the bathrooms with showers and toilets and the kitchen, where cooking stoves would consume the methane produced by the biodigester. During a series of meetings with the beneficiary community, we were requested to add an upper floor where people could meet, eat food prepared in the kitchen and maybe watch television. This made sense from an economic perspective, since women cooking staple foods like rice and beans for their families would not be as profitable as renting out the kitchen for an entire day to women’s groups so that they could prepare snack foods like mandazis, somosas and chapattis to sell to people using the upper floor. So, although we didn’t have money budgeted for constructing an upper floor, we added a staircase to the initial construction of the ground floor. Constructing the staircase along with the walls of the lower floor was much less expensive than it would have been to install a staircase later.

In 2010, the Safaricom Foundation awarded KWENCH a grant to paint the project and to finish the exterior with keying and windows. Some volunteers from the foundation helped us paint the interior of the project in December.

We initially built a temporary structure made of corrugated tin and timber over the opening in the roof over the staircase. But in 2011, seeing the potential for additional funding to come in that would allow us to buy appliances such as stoves and a refrigerator for the kitchen, we decided to construct part of the upper floor using money from globalgiving (http://www.globalgiving.com/1761). We’re going to put a strong door and a big lock on the part of the upper floor that we have already built to protect the stoves and other items inside the project from theft and sabotage.

As soon as we have money to tile the floors in the project’s interior; build cabinets and a work table in the kitchen and install the stoves, refrigerator and kitchen sink we will be ready to open the project for use by the community. Then, we hope to be able to finish construction of the upper floor, furnish it with tables and benches, buy a television, install a refrigerator for soft drinks and build a filter system for the liquid effluent from the biodigester so that mechanical exhaustion, which is very expensive, will be unnecessary.

Kawangware Project as of July 2011

 

Construction starts on part of the upper floor 2011

 

Interior of project after painting

 

Project as of 2009 

 

 

Biodigester under construction 2008

Project under construction 2008