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In the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, water is a scarce resource. The city is located in an extremely dry valley, where most of the scenery is dominated by desert and dusty roads with little greenery or vegetation.

Luisa is a mother of five children, ages 11 years to 7 months. She and her husband, Zenón, arrived in Cochabamba a few years ago with many other migrants from Bolivia’s rural areas when the country`s main mining company closed and left thousands of people unemployed.

The family settled in a marginal area of Cochabamba, where no electricity, paved roads or water services are available.

The water problem in Bolivia is not new. In fact, Cochabamba’s water wars made news in 2000 after protests over water prices erupted into violence. The conflict inspired several movies and documentaries. Today, more than a decade later, Bolivia continues to suffer from South America’s lowest water coverage levels, as well as low quality of services, especially in terms of sanitation.

ChildFund Bolivia works in the most vulnerable and deprived areas of Cochabamba through local partner Obispo Anaya to help families gain access to purified water, educating them about water-usage techniques and improving hygiene and sanitation systems to avoid the spread of diseases that include diarrhea, chagas disease (a parasitic infection), respiratory and skin infections.

Luisa has worked as a community leader with ChildFund Bolivia’s local partner for the past seven years, and one of her family’s main concerns is water. Having to buy water has always been an additional expense that was eating up a big portion of their small monthly budget. Her family still has to buy water, but the expense is lower thanks to ChildFund’s efforts.

At the ChildFund-supported community center, families receive training on how to use a simple water purification system, which requires only sunlight and plastic bottles to kill germs, viruses and bacteria that can be present in water.

“We don’t need to buy bottled water anymore or boil it,” Luisa says. “We used to spend much more money for water. We still have to buy it from the water truck, but we spend less.” The family still buys two to three tanks full of water a week, which is approximately 15 bolivianos (US$2), half of what Zenón makes in one day of work.

Now Luisa trains other mothers in her community about proper usage of water purification systems. Her children are also healthier: Baby Tania is growing much stronger, as well as her brother Jonas, who is 3. Luisa`s three older children attend school and have healed from the skin infections that they used to get before the family began using the water purification system.

ChildFund’s program has helped me in many ways to take better care of my children,” Luisa says. “They have taught us how to better clean our house and avoid diseases, and how to use water better and wash our hands, and I can see the difference, as my little babies don`t get sick anymore, as the elders did.”

It’s common to hear older Bolivians describing adolescents and children as being in their “donkey’s age” because they can be bull-headed. But this perception of youth is now changing in the city of Tarija, southern Bolivia, where children and youth have been given the opportunity to put forward their own solutions for community problems like alcoholism, garbage and poor-quality playgrounds.

“We might be small, but we can do big things” is the slogan of one of the youth clubs.

This dream started with small steps. With support from ChildFund Bolivia, young people created clubs in their local area by choosing their own names, designing logos and writing club constitutions with rules about honesty, punctuality, teamwork and more.

One of the main problems the youth clubs identified was pollution in their neighbourhoods, as well as a lack of good recreational spaces. The few playgrounds that did exist were in poor condition. They also recognised that a lack of street lighting and persistent alcoholism made their neighbourhoods more dangerous. These concerns echoed what ChildFund Bolivia staff heard during our area strategy discussions with the Tarija communities.

After forming a club, the children in Guadalquivir planted 12 trees – which they bought themselves – during a clean-up campaign. In Nueva Esperanza, the club members started a campaign to prevent alcoholism and also purchased new lights for the community’s soccer field. A youth leader, studying architecture, designed a new playground and coordinated the project in Moto Mendez.

One of Tarija’s rural partners had problems with the speed of traffic near a school so the children consulted the mayor. As a result, speed bumps were put in place. In the same area, the youth raised awareness among adults to use the garbage collection services that passed through the community once a week, instead of tossing trash out on the streets or burning it.

Money is often short, so the club members have made alliances with local authorities and parents’ groups. Municipal governments have helped the children’s groups buy trees to plant in their neighbourhoods.

These are just a few examples of how children and youth can speak up, reach out and create change – because as they tell us: “There are more ideas and, of course, a lot of energy!”

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