Mossa Alemu, 42, lives in Tebet Village,  Amhara Region, Ethiopia. He farms a mixed holding of crops and livestock and has five children, one under two years old. Before the Healthy Village programme arrived, the household drew as little water as possible from the hand-dug well in their compound. Lifting water by hand from depth was slow and exhausting. What they did drink made the children ill. “We — especially our children — were usually sick in the stomach,” Mossa said. “When we went to health centres, health workers said it was a waterborne disease.” The family had no vegetables in their garden and could not afford to buy them. His children ate cereals and legume sauce year-round, with no variety. 

The Healthy Village programme, implemented by Plan International Ethiopia in consortium with Max Foundation, selected the household for support. The programme installed a rope and washer pump (RWP) on the existing well and provided a Tulip water filter to treat the water drawn from it. Mossa was trained on operating and maintaining both. The programme also supplied vegetable seeds — cabbage, Swiss chard, beetroot, and carrot — and Mitin, a nutritious food supplement for the child under two. Mossa and his wife joined a Village Economic and Social Association (VESA) group, and they bought additional onion seeds to grow for sale. 

The pump transformed how much water the family could collect. Where hand-lifting meant taking as little as possible, the RWP made larger volumes practical — enough for drinking, cooking, handwashing, laundry, livestock, and irrigating a backyard garden. The Tulip filter removed the contaminants that had been making the children ill. “Now we are drinking the water with good appetite,” Mossa said. The surplus onion harvest earned ETB 6,000 (~€33), which the family spent on cooking oil, salt, and soap. 

The household built an improved latrine with a handwashing facility. “The main thing is having a latrine. Now we can walk everywhere in our home compound,” Mossa said. Health centre visits now happen only for vaccinations and Growth Monitoring and Promotion (GMP) check-ups — not for waterborne illness. The pump also redistributed labour: with the RWP, older children can now collect water themselves, something that was not possible before. 

The programme’s gender sessions reached Mossa directly. He now takes care of the youngest child when his wife is cooking or managing other household tasks. His wife was direct: “Previously he was saying ‘do it yourself’ but now he has some improvements.” Mossa plans to irrigate additional land and grow more vegetables for the market. His longer-term aspiration is a piped water connection at home. For now, the family has clean water from a functioning pump, a productive garden, a proper latrine, and a more varied diet than they had before.