Sanya and Sarah's Campaign for Water!

Hi everyone,

Our names are Sanya and Sarah, and we are students at Saratoga High School.

Worldwide, 1 out of 5 children under the age 5 die due to a water related disease and 319 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are without access to a reliable drinking water source. Exposure to unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene is a leading cause of cholera and other diseases in the African Region.

That’s why Sarah Daoudi and I have started a fundraiser with The Water Project to provide water in Africa. The Water Project is a project which currently supplies water:
southeastern Kenya (60% of the population lacks clean and reliable water), western Kenya (80% of the population lacks clean and reliable water)
western Uganda (35% of the population lacks clean and reliable water), and Sierra Leone (50% of the population lacks clean and reliable water).

The Water Project works with NGO’s (Non-Government Organizations) with an established in-country presence that are able to provide reliable access and maintenance to water sources. They train, equip, and connect them to everything they need.

The really cool thing about The Water Project is that they don’t just build wells. They build sand dams, rainwater catchments, spring protections, drilled wells and improve hygiene and sanitation. They listen to the NGO’s and figure out what particular project would help the village in the selected area. This process allows not only for there to be improvements in the area, but to also create jobs for locals on the way.

If we reach our goal of $350 (and hopefully go above it), The Water Project will mark our project as complete and assign it to help fund a project on their list which will be anything that is listed above. Then, 6-8 months later, we will get an update on the community we are helping, and then a couple month later our project will be complete! We will get a GPS location, and photos (maybe even a video). We will make sure to share any updates with you and post the final project on our class facebook! I have attached an example of a previous project.

The United Nations estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa alone loses 40 billion hours per year collecting water; the same as an entire year's labor in all of France, with a big chunk of that time being girls around the age of 15 which are forced to miss school in order to collect water. Please help us reach our goal and give people a basic necessity that we take for granted. Water.