The Water Project

10/11/2026

International Day of the Girl

Three stalls for the girls. Three for the boys.

That’s the standard specification on our school latrine blocks in Kenya, and it’s not a detail we picked for symmetry. Separate, private, lockable facilities at school are one of the clearest predictors of whether girls keep attending through their teenage years. Not the only one. But a real one, and a solvable one.

A girl who has no private place to manage her period at school does the arithmetic and stays home for a few days each month. A few days each month across a school year is weeks. Weeks across four years is the difference between finishing and not.
Nobody has to be persuaded of this. The girls already know it, the teachers already know it. What's missing is a building.

So we build it. Cement floors, ventilated, easy to clean. Handwashing stations outside with soap in them. A student health club, elected, that keeps them stocked.

On International Day of the Girl, that’s a version of ambition we can actually pour concrete for.

10/10/2026

Soap & Water

You can teach handwashing to a room of people, and they can agree with every word of it, and then go home to a household where water arrives by jerrycan and gets rationed by priority. Drinking first. Cooking second. Washing with whatever is left, if anything is.

This is why handwashing behavior is so hard to change with information alone. It’s not necessarily a knowledge problem. It’s a supply problem dressed in a knowledge problem's clothes.

This is why the training and the water point happen together, never separately, and why school projects get permanent handwashing stations rather than a poster. And why we teach soap making in a lot of places, because soap you can produce at home is soap that’s still there in the lean months.

10/09/2026

October 8th was DAF Day, a national day for recommending grants from donor-advised funds. Whether you've had a DAF for years or are just hearing the term for the first time, Kim talks us through how it works and what it can do for clean water.

Read the blog here: https://buff.ly/iZSH7qS

10/08/2026

On a Saturday morning in Dallas, a group of kids carried full jerrycans around a park until their arms ached.

That was the point. Halston and Valen Miller organized the event to close the last of the gap on a water project at Dr. Maurice Dang'ana Secondary School in western Kenya. It was hosted by their family. Carry the can. Feel the weight. Then talk about it.

The kids got there on their own by the end of the morning: a loop around a park is not the same thing.

At Dang'ana, the rain tanks run dry and students leave campus to queue at a spring shared with the surrounding community. Vivian is sixteen and studies dressmaking there.

"I spend almost two hours in total fetching water for the school."

She doesn’t get to set it down at the end of the loop. That gap is the whole lesson, and reading about it isn’t as powerful as doing it yourself.

What this family helped fund is a borehole well and hand pump on school grounds, two handwashing stations, and latrine blocks for the girls and the boys. A student health club will keep the stations stocked with soap, some of which they will learn to make themselves.

Thanks to this event and other donors, this project has been fully funded!

Learn more about the community that was funded here: https://buff.ly/P95XMOm

10/08/2026

Forty pounds on the end of a rope, hauled up hand over hand, and then again, until the jerrycans are full.

That was how Simbeck Community got water until last year. The well was there. It just had no pump, so collecting from it meant lowering a bucket on a rope and pulling it back up. Children mostly could not manage it. Neither could the older members of the community. And if the rope was left down the well or went missing, nobody could fetch anything until it turned up, which sometimes took days.

The other option was a well far enough away that you could only make one trip, and it ran dry, too.

Last year, the well was rehabilitated. The team drilled to just under eighteen meters and hit water at eleven and a half, then set the cylinder as far below the water table as it would go, which is what keeps it producing through the dry months. New cement platform, walls, and a drainage system to carry spilled water away so none of it sits and breeds mosquitoes. Pump installed, water tested, clean.

Adama is sixteen.

"It is much easier to fetch water here because of the pump."

She studies her notes after school now, which she says she could not do before. She wants to be a nurse.

The pump has been checked four times since it went in, in October, January, April, and July. Functional each time.

Nobody has to look for the rope anymore.

Read more of their story here: https://buff.ly/atdtDdf

10/07/2026

Scoop holes are less than dependable. You dig into a dry riverbed, you wait for water to seep in, and what seeps in depends on the season, on how many people got there first, and on what the livestock have been doing upstream of you.

That was the arrangement in Syandu Community, in southeastern Kenya, until last year. Long walks, long queues, and water that was sometimes fine and sometimes not, with no way to tell which it would be.

Martin is sixteen and one of the people his family sends for water.

"The shorter distance means I spend less energy fetching water and have more time for schoolwork."

He’s specific about what that time is for. Revising lessons. Finishing assignments. Preparing for exams. Arriving at school not already tired, which is its own kind of advantage and one nobody puts on a report.

He wants to finish his education and build a career that lets him support his family. He mentions wanting to give something back to Syandu in the same breath, without being asked.

The well is a year old now. Our team keeps checking on it: hardware inspections, water availability, sanitary surveys, water quality samples. That’s the Water Promise, and it’s the reason there’s a year-two story here at all.

Read more about the community here: https://buff.ly/4ICtWkC

10/06/2026

You can fund a well without telling us your name.

Give anonymously and let the blockchain be the receipt. We'll never know who you are, and the water still gets built. Completed projects funded this way get published as "Built with Crypto," so the proof is public even when the donor isn't.

If you do share contact details, we'll report back specifically: GPS coordinates, photos, and functionality data on the water point your gift paid for, monitored for years afterward.

Either way, the reporting happens. The choice is just how much of it comes to you.

Donate Bitcoin, Ethereum & 100+ cryptocurrencies. Avoid capital gains tax + get full fair-market deduction. $12M+ raised since 2014.

10/06/2026

The water comes out slowly, so the line moves slowly. While you wait, your feet are in the runoff from everyone ahead of you.

That’s what it’s like at the Phillip Lutiali Spring in Mukaniro Community, western Kenya. It’s an open spring, which means the water arrives clean from underground but picks up whatever is sitting on the surface on its way out.

Doreen Jumba is twenty-five.

"A lot of time is wasted that could be spent doing development activities, and other house chores."

What her family learned this year is that the cost isn’t only hours. Her husband had a stomachache that lasted longer than the usual ones, and the painkillers they normally reach for did not touch it. At the health center, they found out it was typhoid. The money for the treatment had been meant for other things.

Doreen and her neighbors have tried to protect and repair this spring themselves more than once. The ideas were sound. What they were missing was the engineering, not the will.

The plan is a spring protection. A waterproof cement structure built around layers of clay, stone, and soil, channeling the water out through a discharge pipe so it never sits open to the surface. A chlorine dispenser goes in at the water point, and the community elects a water user committee to maintain it and collect the fees that keep it maintained.

Doreen has a piece of land she wants to farm. You can help her make it happen.

Donate today: https://buff.ly/CZYVOiC

10/05/2026

Who pays for the repair?

A hand pump has moving parts. Moving parts wear. Somewhere between year two and year five, if something fails: what happens next is not a technical question. It’s a financial one.

So, the money has to exist before the failure does.

In western Uganda, the communities we work alongside elect a water user committee to own and maintain the water point. That committee runs next to a village savings and loan association. A loan association is generally maintained by members contributing regularly, borrowing from the pool, and paying back in.

That structure is the difference between a repair that takes a day and a repair that takes a year, or never happens at all. It’s why we measure downtime in hours rather than weeks, and why we keep checking long after the ribbon is cut.

A well is hardware. A well that still works in year ten is an institution.

10/04/2026

A year ago, the water in Eshabaka Community came from an unprotected spring, and the walk to it was steep enough that falling was a regular part of the trip.

Now it comes from a protected spring, and the queue that used to eat the morning is gone.

Sarah is fifty-three. She’s been the one fetching water for her household for most of her life. What changed first was the clock. Same task, far less of the day.

What did she do with that time? She started saving. She bought cattle. She sells milk to her neighbors, early in the morning and again in the evening. She keeps chickens on a small scale and sells them when they are ready. She makes soap for her own household, which is one expense she no longer carries.

None of that is water. It’s what someone does when the day stops being organized around a queue.

"I am not in a rush in the morning."

Supporters chose to invest in Eshabaka alongside the community, and our team keeps checking on the spring: hardware inspections, water availability, sanitary surveys, water quality samples. That’s the Water Promise, and it’s the reason there's still something to report a year on.

Read more about the community here: https://buff.ly/GQjba8c