EDUCATION RESOURCES
Action for clean water
Action for clean water: secondary
These activities help young people to appreciate the importance of water in our lives.
Learning objectives
Young people will be able to:

Explore how they use water in their own lives

Think critically about the impact of not having access to clean water and sanitation on other
people’s lives

Consider how they might cope if they did not have access to clean water all the time and how
they would adapt

Explore planning, risk management, managing change, dilemmas and some of the
consequences of not having access to clean water and sanitation

Choose and plan an action that could help others who do not have access to clean water and
sanitation (this might be through raising awareness, taking part in collections or charity shop
donations)
Suggested age range: 13 - 16 years old
Starter: What do we use water for? (10 minutes)
1. Ask young people the question: What do we use water for? Ask them to think about the
question on their own for a minute.
2. Ask young people to get into pairs, give each pair some sticky notes and ask them to work
together to record as many water uses as possible in five minutes. They should write each
water use on a separate sticky note.
Spend a few minutes sharing the young people’s ideas as a whole group. Ask if they can think
of any other water uses. Encourage them to think about indirect water uses such as in the
manufacture of many goods. For example, it takes more than 10,000 litres of water to make
one pair of jeans.1
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http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/change-the-course/water-footprint-calculator/
Knowledge building: Essential or non-essential? (15 minutes)
3. Explain that many young people around the world lack access to safe, clean water. Display
slide 2. This is Brenda Chepkemoi. She is 14 years old and lives in a small village called
Chebelion in the south-west of Kenya. Explain that Brenda has to start every day with a twohour round trip to collect water. She gets home just in time to start school. She then has to go
again after school. Not only is the river far away but the water in it is dirty.
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© British Red Cross 2014. All images © British Red Cross 2014 unless otherwise stated.
This resource and other free educational materials are available at www.redcross.org.uk/education
The British Red Cross Society is a charity registered in England and Wales (220949) and Scotland (SCO37738).
EDUCATION RESOURCES
Action for clean water
4. Discuss how the young people might feel if they had to spend a few hours collecting water
each day. Possible questions include:

What activities do you do before and after school?

How might you feel if you weren’t able to do these activities because you had to collect water
instead?

What might it be like to walk, sometimes many miles, to collect water before school?
5. Ask the young people to think about the different water uses they came up with in the first
sticky note activity. Suggested questions:

How would you change your use of water if you had to collect your own water each day?

Which of these water uses are essential and which are non-essential?
6. Ask young people to work in their pairs to sort their water uses into essential and non-essential.
Then discuss their ideas as a class.
7. Share the following water and sanitation facts.

The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any lives war claims
through using guns.

Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children at a rate equivalent of a jumbo jet
plane crashing every four hours.

More than 3.4 million people die each year from harmful water, sanitation, and hygiene-related
causes.

A person in the UK taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the average person in a
developing country slum uses for an entire day.

884 million people in the world lack access to safe water supplies (about 1 in every 8 people).

In many developing countries, women and girls walk on average over 3.5 miles each day to
fetch water; women often spend more than 15 hours per week gathering water.

Diarrhoea is the second leading cause of child death in the world today. Some of the reasons
people are getting diarrhoea are poor sanitation, hygiene, or dirty drinking water.
The following definitions may be useful:
hygiene – activities to keep people and their surroundings clean in order to keep healthy
sanitation – the process of keeping places free from dirt, infection and disease, such as
removing human urine and faeces
Allow time for the young people to respond to the facts. Possible questions include:
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
What might it be like not to have access to water from a tap?

What might it be like not to have access to clean water and sanitation?
© British Red Cross 2014. All images © British Red Cross 2014 unless otherwise stated.
This resource and other free educational materials are available at www.redcross.org.uk/education
The British Red Cross Society is a charity registered in England and Wales (220949) and Scotland (SCO37738).
EDUCATION RESOURCES
Action for clean water

Why do you think some people don’t have access to clean water and sanitation?

Why do you think women and girls are often responsible for collecting water rather than men
and boys?
Knowledge building: What are the consequences of not having access to clean water and
sanitation? (20 minutes)
8. Show young people the video clip to introduce Brenda and Samson and the challenges they
face in accessing clean water and sanitation. Organise young people into groups of three or
four. Provide each group with copies of the case studies of Brenda and Samson. Ask them to
read the case studies in their group and identify the water and sanitation issues faced by
Brenda and Samson.
It is important to remind young people that although many communities in Kenya face similar
issues, this is not the situation for everyone in the country. Some people will have similar
access to water and sanitation as people in the UK.
9. Explain that the young people are going to use a consequence web to explore the impacts of
not having access to clean water and sanitation. Give each group a large sheet of plain paper.
Ask each group to choose one of the water and sanitation issues faced by Brenda and Samson
and write it in a circle or box in the middle of the paper. Possible issues include:

Having to spend a few hours walking each day to fetch water from the river.

Having to use dirty water for cooking, cleaning and drinking.

Having to go to school after hours of walking to collect water.
10. Ask the group to think of any direct consequences of this issue, writing each of these inside
another circle or box which is linked to the main issue. They can then think of consequences of
this direct consequence. These should each be written inside a circle or box, linked to the
direct consequence, and so on.
See slide 3 for an example of a consequence web
11. Allow time for young people to look at and discuss the consequences webs that other groups
have created.
12. Once they have discussed the possible consequences, ask young people:

what might happen to Brenda and her community if there was access to safe, clean
drinking water in their community?

What might the positive impacts be?
You can have a group discussion and capture their ideas on a board of flipchart.
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© British Red Cross 2014. All images © British Red Cross 2014 unless otherwise stated.
This resource and other free educational materials are available at www.redcross.org.uk/education
The British Red Cross Society is a charity registered in England and Wales (220949) and Scotland (SCO37738).
EDUCATION RESOURCES
Action for clean water
Taking action: What would you do? (30 minutes)
13. Organise young people into groups of three or four. Provide each group with a copy of the
resource sheet: What would you do? This sheet summarises some of the water and sanitation
challenges faced by Brenda and the other young people at Chebelion School.

Young people have to rely on dirty water from the river for cooking, cleaning and drinking at
school. The river is eight kilometres away.

There aren’t enough toilets at the school.

Young people at the school have received little education about the importance of good
hygiene.
Ask young people to imagine that they are working for the Kenya Red Cross Society. They
should work together in their group to plan what could be done to support Brenda and her
community to overcome these problems. Give each group a copy of the Planning solutions
table to guide them in planning their solutions. Encourage them to think about factors such as:

background country information

the cost, expertise, skills and resources required

how long-term the solutions are

how much it will involve the local community

whether the solutions will have any other benefits
14. Allow time for each group to present their ideas to the rest of the class and then discuss the
potential solutions as a whole class.
15. Give each group copies of the case studies of Sylester and Amos. Explain that these young
people and their communities were facing similar water and sanitation problems as the young
people at Chebelion Primary School. The Kenya Red Cross Society has provided support to
these communities to enable them to access clean water and sanitation. Ask young people to
compare these solutions with their group’s ideas. Possible questions include:
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
What are the similarities and differences between your group’s ideas and the solutions
implemented by the Kenya Red Cross Society?

What resources do you think would have been required for the solutions implemented by
Kenya Red Cross Society?

How sustainable do you think the solutions implemented by the Kenya Red Cross Society are?

What other benefits might these solutions have had? For example, building the toilets could
have provided employment for local builders.
© British Red Cross 2014. All images © British Red Cross 2014 unless otherwise stated.
This resource and other free educational materials are available at www.redcross.org.uk/education
The British Red Cross Society is a charity registered in England and Wales (220949) and Scotland (SCO37738).
EDUCATION RESOURCES
Action for clean water
Taking action: What action shall we take? (40 minutes)
16. Ask young people to think about what actions they could take to try and help others around the
world who do not have access to clean water and sanitation. This could be through raising
awareness about the issue or by fundraising. They may have other ideas of their own.
17. Organise young people into groups of three. Each group should identify up to nine possible
actions that they could take. They should write each action on a separate sticky note (or a
piece of paper).
18. Ask each group to rank their actions in a diamond formation (show slide 4), in order of how
effective they think the action is. Prompt them to think about how easy an action is and how
much impact it will have. The most effective action should be placed at the top, followed by a
row of the next two, then a row of three and so on.
Emphasise that there are no right or wrong answers – there will be advantages and
disadvantages to every action, and they should rank them as they think best.
Here are some ideas which young people could use as a starting point for their own:

Hold a cake sale to raise money to support the work of the British Red Cross.

Deliver an assembly about what you have learned for the rest of the school.

Blog, vlog or tweet about the issue.

Write an article for the local newspaper to raise awareness of the challenges some people face
in accessing clean water and sanitation.

Plan and deliver a workshop at a local primary school to raise awareness of these issues.

Organise a collection of second-hand books and clothes to take to your local British Red Cross
charity shop.
19. Share their ideas as a whole class. Explore the choices that young people have made and their
reasons for them. Finally, discuss the criteria they used to make their decisions, for example,
feasibility, appropriateness, effectiveness and cost.
20. Ask each group to choose an action to plan. A planning template is available to download.
Allow time for the young people to share their plans with other groups.
(Extension: Support the young people to carry out and evaluate their action plans.)
Closing reflections: What have we learned about water? (15 minutes)
21. Ask young people to use the Evaluation wheel to reflect on their learning and the skills they
have developed. They should mark a cross or dot on each inner line of the wheel to how they
feel about the learning or skills described in each statement. The closer the mark is to the
outside of the circle the wheel the more confident they feel about the related statement. The
closer the mark is to the inside of the wheel the less confident they are. They should then join
their marks together with straight lines to create an octagon.
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© British Red Cross 2014. All images © British Red Cross 2014 unless otherwise stated.
This resource and other free educational materials are available at www.redcross.org.uk/education
The British Red Cross Society is a charity registered in England and Wales (220949) and Scotland (SCO37738).