Travel For Good - Newmarket Holidays' partnership with Just a Drop

Just a Drop brings sustainable safe water, sanitation and hygiene projects to communities around the world. Safe water changes everything. It improves health, education, women’s rights, leads to secure food sources, economic growth and brighter futures. It completely transforms lives, especially those of women and children.

Newmarket Holidays is incredibly excited to have partnered with Just a Drop to have a real, tangible, and sustainable impact through the construction of a latrine block at a local school in Nicaragua, Central America.

Across Nicaragua, latrine and hand-washing facilities are limited, which leads to open defecation and increases the risk of disease. In addition to this, only 6% of schools have gender-specific toilets – this prevents girls from having the privacy they need when on their periods and causes them to drop out of school.

Los Calpules School is in a remote area of Nicaragua. The school currently has latrines, but they’re old, unclean, and dilapidated, meaning that the children are often forced to defecate outside rather than use the toilets. This creates a serious hygiene and sanitation problem and means that there are high levels of diarrhoea, and the students are forced to miss out on school due to illness.

Two Newmarket Holidays' teams will compete in a virtual cycle race across Nicaragua to fundraise for an ambitious joint project.

With Just a Drop, we’ll help build two double-pit latrines (one for boys and one for girls) and one single pit latrine (for teachers). We’ll also install handwashing facilities in the school. Having access to clean water and handwashing facilities enables the schools to protect themselves from Covid-19. It also means that the children especially will benefit from increased health, improved performance in school and in the long term, improved economic opportunities. As with all Just a Drop’s projects, the community are involved at every stage and will own and maintain the solution.

Our project with Just a Drop aims to achieve the following:

- Children will be healthier and attend school in a more hygienic environment.

- More children can access an education and have access to toilets and hand-washing facilities.

- Girls, in particular, will benefit, as they’ll be able to access adequate toilet facilities when on their periods – this will enable them to remain in school and not at risk of dropping out.

- Hygiene practices, such as hand washing, become common, leading to long-term health benefits.

- The local community is protected from the spread of Covid-19.

- Families have more disposable income as they’re no longer spending money on expensive doctors’ bills.

- The project will prevent open defecation.

Please support this project. Your contribution makes a difference.