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Ebola: The Veolia Foundation working in Guinea with the French Red Cross

At the request of the French Government, the French Red Cross has opened a treatment center in Macenta, southeast Guinea, the site of one of the main outbreaks of the Ebola fever epidemic that has been raging since January. With 60 beds, it will take stress off the country's other centers, which are totally saturated, and help step up the campaign to prevent the virus from spreading across the entire region.
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The French Red Cross is able to tap into the expertise of Doctors without Borders to supervise the center's construction and train its personnel, and has called on the Veolia Foundation to design and install a complex water treatment system, a crucial component in the Center's logistics.

Guillaume Cubizolles, Operations Manager, Center East France region, and an experienced volunteer with Veoliaforce (past missions in China and Haiti), was on site for three weeks to oversee the successful completion of this task. He installed three networks operating in parallel, supplied from an existing bore. Each of these three networks, with the associated tanks and booster pumps, can distribute water with a different chlorine content: clear water, water chlorinated at 0.05 % and water chlorinated at 0.5 %. Each is designed for very specific uses for patient care, cleaning and disinfection. Around ten distribution points have been installed in various parts of the Center with different colored taps to clearly identify the different chlorine concentrations.

The creation of this Center and its operation, largely funded by the French authorities through the AFD (French Development Agency), is part of a broader action plan to combat the Ebola epidemic in Guinea.

The Foundation is providing advice and expertise for Guinea's national water service.

Last July, the Foundation, at the request of the Guinean Department of Energy and Water, signed a memorandum of understanding under which it agreed to provide advice and expertise to SNAPE (Institutional Support for the National Water Point Management Service) employees in the area of drinking water supply projects in rural and semi-urban areas.

Thanks to the Foundation's support, a first water supply system is already being installed in Damaro, Kérouané Prefecture in the country's west. It will supply water to a population of nearly 7,000 people.

A project to train Guinean technical supervisors is also being developed with the aim of adapting the Campus training program in the area of drinking water service engineering and management to the context of a developing country. The Foundation intends to provide this training with the assistance of Veoliaforce volunteers from the first half of 2015.

> Read the testimony of your volunteer: Guillaume Cubizolles

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