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Goats for water project

Why this is important 

In Pakistan, some 40% of people live off the grid in villages in the rural areas. This means that without electricity to supply power to homes and pump water, women must travel four or more hours a day to fetch drinking water from distant wells as water is essential for the growth of both plants and livestock. The scarcity of water results in excessive time consumption and has significant impacts on health and livelihood outcomes. The British Asian Trust, in partnership with UpTrade is working on an innovative model for empowering women in remote rural communities through enabling them to barter goats – one of their few abundant commodities - for solar water pumps.   

These solar pumps free up 4-6 hours of their time, which is then devoted to other activities, including income generation. In addition, the solar pump provides clean water for livestock resulting in lower mortality, higher fertility, higher weight animals resulting in more income for farming households including women farmers. Families have also been shown to use the accessible water to grow food for themselves and for sale.  

Project Partners: UpTrade

Duration: 2022 - 2023 

Project goals  

With the British Asian Trust’s experience of delivering complex, multi-stakeholder programmes, we aim to increase incomes, through improved access to water and electricity, of 8,000 women and girls in remote, off-grid rural communities in Pakistan. We will also build the capacity of our local partner to potentially scale up and benefit thousands more going forward. The main goals of the project include the following:  

  • Training of mobilisation teams and their deployment to mobilise target communities and engage them in project activities 
  • Solar pump purchase and installation by the project team. In collaboration with communities, the project will support them to sell their goats and purchase solar pumps to provide clean and accessible water 
  • Ongoing support from the project team for women farmers to sell their livestock using an E-Mandi online platform to market and sell livestock 
  • Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) capacity building to constitute a robust research project to evaluate the impact of the project on the incomes and empowerment of women and girls in target communities 

What we are doing

The project, with the help of Halcrow Foundation, is running a pilot research evaluation by evidencing and evaluating interventions and their impact on women and girls. Targets are generated and measured as per the evidence and are specified during the development of the MEL framework. In addition, there is a planned installation of 12 pumps in target communities. 

For this project, the British Asian Trust and partners have employed an independent MEL specialist to develop a comprehensive research evaluation to assess the impact of the intervention on outcomes for women and girls.  

Key outcomes of the project include:  

  1. 8,000 women and girls in 40 target communities are empowered to increase their individual and household income 
  2. Increased partner capacity and evidence of impact to inform and support future scale up