Q&A: Flemish student helps build water purification plant in Ghana

Your internship in Ghana lasted seven weeks. What did you do?
Water4Ghana was founded in 2009 by two students from Campus De Nayer who designed a water purification plant for a village in northern Ghana for their Bachelor’s thesis. A couple of teachers became very interested in this topic, and that’s how the project developed. Since then, at least two students from our college have gone there every year to continue working on this project.

Before my fellow student and I left this summer, there were three villages that had been supplied with clean drinking water. When we arrived, we only had seven weeks to supply three additional villages. So we had to work very hard. We worked seven days a week, 11 hours a day.

Did you collaborate with the local population?
Yes. We worked very closely with locals, which is part of the agreement. They do much of the work, while we supply all the materials. The pipeline network is about five kilometres long.

Was it difficult to translate your theoretical knowledge into practice?
At school, we indeed learn about most things at a theoretical level. At first, it was difficult to put this knowledge into practice, but after a while we got used to it. I was actually surprised by how many topics we learned about in school that we also faced in real life. Although in classes, we always learn field by field, while here, we had to see everything as a whole.

What did you get out of the experience?
I gained a lot of knowledge and skills during those seven weeks. First, there was the technical part that we had to translate into practice. Then there was the project management part. Since the project consisted of three villages, we had to supervise the work of a lot of people, listen to a lot of opinions and deal with a lot of problems.

In the beginning, we weren’t very efficient because we didn’t plan ahead enough. By the end, we did, and we were able to do in half a day what earlier took us two days. At a personal level, I feel like I’ve become more mature and responsible since my internship in Ghana. Being there has also given me a broader outlook on life and society.

Photo courtesy Water4Ghana vzw