This is an installment in the ‘Still Reading the Handbook’ blog series featuring new members of our team. “Welcome to the team!” I must have heard it a dozen times my first weeks at The Water Project. From colleagues. From the teams on the ground in Kenya and Uganda and Sierra Leone. Even from our […]

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 heart that I wanted to join a non-profit organization. I felt like my work […]

There’s a photograph we take at the end of every project. Water coming out of a new pump. People gathered around it. Somebody laughing. Children splashing water. It’s a great photograph and we’re not going to stop taking it. But it captures an arrival, and the arrival is only half of what your giving does. […]

How many times have you felt sick and thought, “The only place I can get well is the hospital”? I walked to Mugai Health Center with confidence. The moment I entered the compound, the first thing I saw was a beautiful, well-kept borehole. The water point was clean. A community member was fetching water, and […]

“Water is like a child; it always wants to be in motion,” wrote Viraj Mahajan. We know water changes lives when it flows freely in homes, schools, and communities. When I joined The Water Project about six years ago as a Field Officer, I thought my job would be straightforward: equip communities with the knowledge […]

There’s a monster living in the toilet. It is deep inside the tank. Tiny, invisible, and always hungry. Its whole reason for existing is to eat, and what it eats is the waste we would rather not think about. Okay, in all seriousness: it’s not a monster. But it IS alive, and by the end […]

There is a path on the way to the river that has been walked for so long, nobody can remember who carved it. It’s too narrow for a vehicle. Too winding for an oxcart. It was made by feet, bare feet, mostly small ones carrying something. The path doesn’t know it’s becoming a relic. It […]

There’s a pig in Alice Andeso’s yard, and the pig is the point. The pig is also the part of the story we don’t usually tell. You probably know the story well: Donors fund a well. The well brings clean water. A child goes to school more easily, a household runs more cleanly, illness recedes. […]

How do men, women and children emotionally cope with long-term water insecurity? That is the question I kept asking myself this week as I visited several communities and schools. It reminded me of growing up as a young girl without water in school, and I could connect with the emotional weight the young boys and […]

I am Gladys Akinyi, an assistant hydrogeologist at The Water Project’s Regional Service Hub in Western Kenya. After high school, I studied geoscience, and today my work is to help find water for communities that do not have it. I want to begin by speaking to the young girls who dream of a career like […]