About CU EWB in Ait Bayoud
The Morocco Program began in 2011 when the Columbia University Chapter was contacted by Nina Morency-Brassard, a Peace Corps Volunteer stationed in Ait Bayoud. This initial connection brought our program in touch with the ABDA and laid the foundation for our collaboration. In the summer of 2013, the program completed a bridge project in this community to connect the North and South areas of the community during the flood season. The water supply project began in July 2013, shortly after the bridge was completed. There have been two assessment trips for the water supply project in 2014 and 2015 then a new piping procedure was attempted in 2016-2017 ....
Ait Bayoud is a rural agrarian community in the Essaouira province of Morocco. Izgouaren and Ilguiloda are two of the poorest towns in this community. In the nearby Atlas Mountains, seasonal rain rapidly floods the Tagawowt river, the normally calm central water source for Ait Bayoud. Ait Bayoud is made up of twelve douars, or communities. Amongst these douars, there are two relatively isolated communities, Izgouaren and Ilguiloda, located 85m and 220m above the river level, respectively. A water supply, storage, and distribution system currently exists in the main douars in Ait Bayoud, but Izgouaren and Ilguiloda are excluded due to their remote location and lack of a nearby, year-round water source. Thus, to satisfy their water demands for daily needs, the communities we are trying to serve have to gather water from a spring located in the riverbed. This requires slowly hiking up and down a plateau an hour each way multiple times a day in order to get the water they need. The time dedicated to gathering water is largely the responsibility of women and children. Consequently, the growth and progress of these communities are stalled as other necessities, such as healthcare and education are not given the proper attention. Currently, between the two communities, only one child attends school on a regular basis. Initial tests of the quality of the springwater indicated the presence of fecal coliform, likely due to the fact that the community members’s livestock also drink from the spring and defecate nearby. This finding is consistent with the fact that the main issue that the community hospital treats is gastrointestinal illness.
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The goal of this summer's Water Supply project is to provide a sustainable source of water for one of the two remote douars (communities) within Ait Bayoud, whose residents currently have to travel up to four hours a day to a spring to collect water. After the first team arrived in Ait Bayoud in summer of 2019 and assessed the areas, they determined that the project would need to be split into two summers in order to design, create, and implement a more sustainable, quality water system. Both Izgouaren and Ilguiloda are on plateaus that are 85m and 220m, respectively, above the river level. The goal of our project is to provide them with an easily accessible water source. Through providing accessible water, we hope that the project will be a foundation for improved education rates among the children, since they will no longer have to support their families by collecting water.
