The Water Project

08/30/2026

Let's talk about donkeys.

In the dry parts of southeastern Kenya, a donkey is water infrastructure; not a pet, not a luxury. If your household has one, it carries the jerrycans. If it doesn't, you carry them on your shoulders, across whatever the terrain happens to be.

This makes owning a donkey one of the quieter dividing lines in a community. Two families on the same path, same distance, same water source, and one of them is walking beside a load while the other is walking under one.

The donkeys don't have a soft time of it either. On steep, rocky ground, loaded, they slip. Children have described watching one go down with the day's water on its back, which means the animal is hurt, the water is gone, and the trip starts over.

So here's a small thing that happens when water arrives close to home. The trip gets short enough that it stops being a haulage operation. Nobody's shoulders. Nobody's donkey.

We have never once written "gives the donkey a break" in a project report.

It happens anyway.

08/29/2026

A fair question to ask any organization that builds water infrastructure: what happens when it breaks?

Because it will. Pumps have moving parts. Seals wear, handles loosen, things fail.
Here's how you can tell whether an organization means its answer. Go look at their monitoring records and see whether the word "broken" ever appears.

On ours, it does.

Every project we've built has a public page, and every page carries the full checkup history. Most entries say "Functional". Some say the pump was down, or the water was low, or something needed attention. Those entries stay up. We don't quietly delete them once a well is repaired.

We publish them because a monitoring record that only ever says "Functional" isn't a monitoring record. It's marketing.

Here's what a failure actually costs, and it's the reason the repair clock is the number we watch. The old water source hasn't gone anywhere. The river is still there. The scoop hole is still there. A family that can't get water from the well today will get water from somewhere, and somewhere is the place that used to make them sick. Sometimes one glass is enough to undo months of good health.

So a pump down for a season isn't a maintenance issue. It's a community going back to the water we spent years helping them leave.

Which is why most of this work is unglamorous. Elected caretakers who notice the handle feeling different. Committees holding maintenance funds so a repair doesn't need a fundraiser. Monitoring visits up to four times a year whether or not anyone has reported a problem. Field teams living close enough to actually turn up.

Sub-Saharan Africa is full of broken wells installed by people who meant well and then left.

We'd rather show you the ones that broke and got fixed.

08/28/2026

Stasia joined Donor Services in the spring, and in a few short months she has learned two new vocabularies: fundraising and clean water. She writes about what surprised her most, including how much of this work is conversation rather than paperwork, and the hardest part of the job she never saw coming. Her piece kicks off Still Reading the Handbook, a new series from members of our team who are still figuring out where everything is.

Read her blog here: https://buff.ly/9H659Jm

This is an installment in the ‘Still Reading the Handbook’ blog series featuring new members of our team. In the fall of 2025, I began the search for a new job. Though I cast a wide net, I knew in my…

08/27/2026

In 1978, after a drought that killed enough livestock to push families into poverty, a group of farmers in southeastern Kenya organized themselves. They called themselves Kyeni kya Karuli, and they had two problems to solve: not enough food, not enough water.
By 1983, they had built their own sand dam.

It worked for fourteen years. Water was closer, farms produced more, families ate better. Then the storms of 1997 came through and the dam failed. It hadn't been engineered to hold. Food and water shortages came straight back.

They stayed together anyway.

By the time we met them, the group was decades old and the community was walking three kilometers to a borehole where water cost five shillings per twenty-liter jerrycan, which many families couldn't pay. Some days you made the walk and found the pump locked. The alternative was digging holes in the bed of a seasonal river, deeper and deeper as the dry months went on, until by October the holes were deep enough to be genuinely dangerous for small children.

Five hours a day, on average, spent fetching water.

The community picked the site. We checked the bedrock underneath it. In November 2016, a new sand dam went in, 54.7 meters long and 4.6 meters high, with a hand-dug well beside it.

A year later, Moses Muthengi described the difference in a way we haven't been able to improve on. "Right now, we take less than 30 minutes to get our water," he said. Vegetables at their farms now, eaten and sold, with neighbors and vendors coming to buy. And this: they'd started making bricks with the spare water, built better houses with them, and sold the extra.

Naomi Mwenda used to walk six kilometers. Her cattle now walk a short distance, which she pointed out has spared them the lung problems that come from breathing dust on a long dry trek. Grass has grown in along the riverbed where the water sits in the sand, so there's grazing there, too.

Our teams have checked that dam thirty-seven times. Most recently this June. Functional every single time.

Wikwatyo wa Aka Kilulu, the community in our fall campaign, is asking for the same kind of project. This is what one looks like a decade on.

More about the project: https://buff.ly/Hqoo4sk

Donate to our fall campaign: https://buff.ly/LONnb3r

08/26/2026

Today is Women's Equality Day. Here's a fact about water that reorganizes how you think about the word ”equality".

In most of the communities we work alongside, water collection is women's work. Women and girls do the walking, the queuing, the hauling. It’s unpaid, it’s physically punishing, and it’s not optional. Where a round trip runs four hours, that is most of a working day, every day, permanently unavailable for anything else.

You can't build a business in the hours you don't have. You can't finish school. The arithmetic is that simple and it doesn’t care how capable you are.

So when a water point goes in close to home, what comes back first isn't comfort. It's time, and it comes back mostly to women. That's why the after-stories are so often about a woman starting something: a garden, a shop, a fish pond, a savings group.

Here's the part we'd rather lead with, though.

While the burden falls on women, so does the expertise. Gladys Akinyi is an assistant hydrogeologist at our regional hub in western Kenya. She sites boreholes with geophysical equipment, files the drilling permits, supervises the rigs, and inspects finished wells with a down-the-hole camera. She wrote something for us recently that we keep coming back to:

"In the engineering sector, women are few, but we have the most to gain."

Her advice to girls considering it: start with science, stay curious, find mentors, walk through every door that opens.

Water and equality isn't only about who carries the jerrycan. It's about who gets to decide where the well goes.

Gladys' blog: https://buff.ly/Zq1wRj4

08/26/2026

Emma, a member of our Program Team, is posting on LinkedIn about her experience during World Water Week in Stockholm - follow us on LinkedIn to see more of her posts!

Click below to see her first post from the Water for People and Progress conference running until August 27th.

https://buff.ly/Rrj8XYp

08/25/2026

08/25/2026

One protected spring in western Uganda, still running after eight years, was paid for by twenty-nine separate fundraising pages.

Not one grant. Not one major donor. Twenty-nine.

Among them: a handful of school clubs, a health and wellness floor in a college dorm, several groups of friends who put their names on a page together, and a girl who asked for water instead of gifts at her bat mitzvah.

None of those pages raised enough on its own to protect a spring. Together they protected one, and it has been checked thirty-two times since and worked every single time.

We think about this a lot in late August, when school groups are planning their year and deciding what to take on. If you've ever looked at a fundraising total and thought it was too small to matter, that spring is the argument against it.

That community has had clean water for eight years because a bunch of teenagers ran fundraisers! Food for thought.

08/24/2026

We asked Tabitha Simon what she would do with the time. Not how she'd feel. What she'd do. She's 41, a farmer and a mother in southeastern Kenya, and a single trip for water currently takes her two hours.

Her answer: cook for her children, herd the goats, get the farm ready for the next rains. And then this. "I would also get time to interact with my neighbors and practice table banking more effectively."

Table banking. Neighbors meeting, pooling money on a table, lending it out among themselves. That's what she'd like more hours for.

Here's what those hours currently go to: Wikwatyo wa Aka Kilulu is a community on steep, rocky, and very dry ground. There are two water options. A protected dug well, cleaner but far from most homes and low through the dry season. And scoop holes: pits dug into the bed of a seasonal river, open to the sky, ringed with animal waste and debris. The water in them looks clear. It tastes of salt and it smells.

Tabitha makes one trip a day, and only one, because the ground is steep enough that doing it twice isn't realistic. Not everyone in the community has a donkey. The people who don't carry the jerrycans on their shoulders. What worries her isn't the walking.

"I know that every time my family drinks that water, there's a risk of falling sick with things like typhoid, amoeba, or diarrhea," she said. "As a mother and community member, it's painful to see our children exposed to that kind of danger just because we don't have a better alternative." There have been repeated cases of all three.

Here's the plan, worked out by our technical team and the community together: a sand dam across the seasonal riverbed, with a protected dug well alongside it.

A sand dam doesn't hold back water the way you'd picture. It's a wall that catches sand. The rains come, the river runs, and a share of the sand drops out behind the wall. Season after season it piles up, and water collects in the spaces between the grains, shaded from the sun and filtered by the sand. Months after the river has stopped running, the water is still there. Sink a well beside it and you can draw from it year-round.

The group already knows what it plans to do with that water: vegetable gardens, tree planting, better livestock management, terracing to stop the soil washing away. That's their list, not ours.

This fall, your donations to this project are matched 3X until October 31st!

Give today: https://buff.ly/LONnb3r

Learn more about the community: https://buff.ly/IZjw5kq