Our Partnership with Just a Drop

Founded in 1998, Just a Drop has encouraged travel and tourism businesses to give back to the communities they operate in. Across the globe, 785 million people don’t have access to safe water and drinking dirty water makes people ill, holds back development and makes it harder for communities to escape the poverty trap. With the help of the community-owned, sustainable, and carefully monitored projects they create, the charity has now reached over 1.9 million people across 32 countries.

We’re 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, South America.

Across Nicaragua, latrine and handwashing 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 had latrines, but they were old, unclean, and dilapidated, meaning that the children were often forced to defecate outside rather than use the toilets. Creating a serious hygiene and sanitation problem and meaning that there were high levels of diarrhoea, forcing students to miss out on school due to illness.

With Just a Drop, we’ve helped build two double-pit latrines (one for boys and one for girls) and one single pit latrine (for teachers). We’ve also installed handwashing facilities in the school. Having access to clean water and handwashing facilities means that the children 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 aimed to achieve the following:

• Ensure that the 27 children and staff of Los Calpules School can attend school in a more hygienic environment.
  
  
• More children can access an education and have access to toilets and handwashing facilities.
  
  
• Girls to benefit as they’ll be able to access adequate toilet facilities when on their periods – enabling them to remain in school and not at risk of dropping out.
  
  
• To encourage hygiene practices, such as hand washing, become common, leading to long-term health benefits.
  
  
• Allow families to have more disposable income as they’re no longer spending money on expensive doctors’ bills.
  
  
• The project will prevent open defecation.

Our virtual cycle race fundraising event

In March 2023, we held a virtual cycle race to fundraise for new school latrines in Nicaragua.

Around 50 employees, including our chief executive, Niel Alobaidi, spent a day on exercise bikes in the office to cycle 297 miles – equivalent to the width of Nicaragua.

We split into two teams, Team Managua and Team Granada, named after cities in Nicaragua, to see which could do the most miles. We were sponsored by friends, family, and industry colleagues to take part, and successfully raised over £5,000.

“Newmarket Holidays is a really valuable, new partner for us, and they understand how important it is to give back to communities.”

Fiona Jeffery, Just a Drop founder

Our virtual rowing race fundraising event

In May 2024, we held another fundraising event, which involved rowing the length of Central America’s longest lake in a virtual rowing race

In total, we rowed 100 miles on two machines in our head office and raised another £2,000 for Just a Drop. 

Our chief executive, Niel Alobaidi, was among those to row, paired up against our chief people and customer officer, Ian Dines, after the work force was split into two teams to compete against each other. 

“This community doesn’t have access to clean water and this affects them in a number of ways: children drop out of school a lot earlier and they can’t attract good quality teachers. This project has been purely funded by the staff and their teams, with each team rowing 50 miles.”

Niel Alobaidi, CEO