FINAL REPORT Community Plumbing Challenge: Navajo Nation

Now in its’ fourth year of challenges where licenced plumbers and other trades are invited into tough places to make real changes, this year the Housing for Health survey-fix process was carried out to test and fix the health hardware at the start of the CPC.

The dedicated team behind The International Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Foundation (IWSH) coordinated the trades and partnered with two groups for the event; DigDeep – an organisation committed to provide access to clean water to all Americans and the Baca/Prewitt Chapter of the Navajo Nation. The CPC was presented as part of the larger Navajo Water Project; a multi-million dollar initiative to bring clean, running water to hundreds of families in Northwest New Mexico.

The Navajo Nation is the largest land area home to a Native American tribe today, where 40% of the Navajo Nation population (approximately 69,600 people) live without running water or a toilet.

The CPC commenced with Housing for Health (HfH) survey-fix that tested and checked 250 essential safety and health hardware items in each of the 10 houses nominated. This work was completed by a small team of 4 local people trained and led by a Team Leader, as in the Australian work.

Over the course of the intensive, week-long assignment in October 2018, teams of trades and local residents upgraded bathrooms and kitchens, including the installation of new basins, taps, toilets, water tanks, water pumps, and hot and cold water, plus installation of and connection to new wastewater systems.

Like in any HfH survey, local teams were trained in the methodology of the survey, fixed hardware and collected before and after survey data that produced the following results.

For 30 years HH has had the goal of improving living environments to improve health and by the end of the 2 week Challenge, 89% of the 10 houses had a working shower, 89% had a working toilet and 22% improved nutrition (the ability to store, prepare and cook food) improvements from no function before the challenge.

To view details of the housing for health data from this project see, click here. 

To view the full project report, click here.