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Every good thing made possible by access to safe water depends on it being available every day - year after year.

This project in Kenya is part of The Water Promise campaign - and includes project implementation, monitoring technology, training maintenance teams, and setting aside five years of repair funding to ensure reliable, ongoing safe water.

The project will begin with effective community selection and engagement. Safe water will be provided through a complete rehabilitation of a nonfunctional water source or drilling a new well in a community. Communities participate in comprehensive sanitation and hygiene training, and community led water committees are built and/or strengthened. Additionally, monitoring is put in place to ensure that water continues to flow for years to come.

As an investor in this program, you will receive reporting updates with photos, stories, and the GPS coordinates of your project so you can see the faces and read the stories of the people whose lives you've helped transform.

But it won't end there.

Once installed, beginning in Q1 2016, we’ll upload monitoring data from sensors to show daily functionality of the project, and you’ll see when our teams make repairs.

We all need to know if water is still flowing in a month, a year, the year after that, etc. Water service is what matters most for those we serve.

We're all in this together - you, The Water Project, our partners, and the communities we serve together.

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Rehabilitation is not just fixing a pump - it’s total community re-engagement.

There’s only one thing we can think of that might be worse than not having safe water: having safe water, and then losing it because a project fell into disrepair.

Rehabilitation often proves to be a big challenge, as many wells have sit idle for years and there is typically little information about the specifics of the well. A borehole and dug well rehabilitation involves quite a bit of discovery. First, our teams work to discover as much as they can about the initial project. What materials were used? Was the borehole/hand-dug well properly constructed? Many of these questions can only be answered by diving in, and doing “the work” which makes up a rehabilitation.

Once our teams have found the problem, they find the solution. Then, they reconstruct the well and install a hand pump.

Engagement and training with communities takes into account rehabilitation was needed and alters the program to suit the needs of the community. After all - engaging with this community in the same way which led to the initial, failed project will not bring new results. Our teams work to understand the social and support reasons leading to initial failure, and make those areas a focus of our ongoing engagement with communities.

Water projects don’t last long without the help of local leaders. They’re the ones who explain the situation on the ground to us (and our donors!) while also outlining our goals and intentions for the community members.

The Water Project identifies, supports, and partners with local organizations that share our vision of reliable, verifiable, and clean water. Together, we build lasting local solutions and undertake ongoing monitoring and resolution to ensure our solutions are still working years into the future.

We engage the communities we work with at every step of a water project.

These interactions are rooted in relationship-building. We involve the community in implementation, set expectations for water point management, prepare community members for ongoing costs, and more. All of this happens before a water project is installed.

The people receiving a water project get a leading seat at the table. Every water project we implement requires negotiations with several interested parties. During this step and every other, we continuously try to embody our favorite ideals: reliability, relationship, and trust.

We install uniquely engineered chlorine dispensers at all of our spring protection projects so community members can treat their water with a pre-measured dose of chlorine. Diluted chlorine is a regular part of water treatment, worldwide. The chlorine stays active for two to three days, ensuring water stays safe to use even when stored at home. Both the chlorine delivery and the maintenance of these dispensers are a part of our ongoing community support.

Water projects don’t last long without the help of local leaders. They’re the ones who explain the situation on the ground to us (and our donors!) while also outlining our goals and intentions for the community members.

The Water Project identifies, supports, and partners with local organizations that share our vision of reliable, verifiable, and clean water. Together, we build lasting local solutions and undertake ongoing monitoring and resolution to ensure our solutions are still working years into the future.

ODF status is a formal certification made by local government, requiring 100% compliance from every single household - absolutely no signs of visible poop in the environment and 100% of households using latrines. This is a community-driven partnership. The Water Project provides extensive education and training on household latrine construction and the community comes together to participate, supply the materials and construct their latrines.

Easily made latrine slabs encourage household bathroom construction.

Proper hygiene and sanitation facilities go hand-in-hand with access to clean, reliable water.

A SanPlat is most literally the slab one would squat over when utilizing the bathroom.

The community chooses 5 households to receive SanPlats made on site under our training and guidance. The goal: seeing the need for safe latrines throughout their community, each household will be inspired to build their own.

For many communities, water is just the beginning. Living without water deprioritizes things that deplete water rations, like bathing, cleaning, and even handwashing. Also, in some cases, community members who couldn’t afford to go to school never learned topics usually covered in health classes. A steady water supply on its own won’t solve these issues, which is why we train the people in every community, school, and health center we provide with a water project.

Although we tailor the subjects we cover in each training to each region and community, there are some staples we always touch on: water handling and storage; personal and environmental hygiene; disease transmission; how to form and maintain a water user committee; and the operation/maintenance of the community’s new water project.

With each training, our goal is to empower communities to take back their personal health so growth and development can begin.

Sub-Saharan Africa is littered with broken and abandoned wells installed by well-meaning people.

We love celebrating when a project is complete and a community has access to clean, safe water. However, reliability is the true measure of our impact.

Water can only transform lives if it’s always there. Water-fetchers need to know that when they visit one of our water points, there will always be water. Sometimes, it only takes one sip of dirty water to make someone sick, even if they’d been drinking clean water for months beforehand.

This is why we measure our water projects’ downtime in hours, not days or weeks. Each hour is critical to someone’s life, and each hour someone has to wait for clean water is another opportunity to go back to the rivers, swamps, and scoop holes they resorted to before our water project was installed. Our past water projects are just as important as what we tackle in the future.

The Water Project monitors all of our water projects to make sure water service continues. To learn more about how you can help with ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and resolution, read about The Water Promise: a group of amazing, world-changing monthly donors who understand the power of keeping water flowing long after the installation is done.

Project Status

We’re working hard to make sure your gifts result in a lasting water project for the community it serves. Our engagement with a community begins many months before construction and lasts years after construction. The timeline here is focused on the physical construction of the water project. There is also training and engagement work that has already started.

Water project construction in the developing world is hard work. A lot of things can and do cause delays - which are normal. We attempt to make our best judgment of when construction will be complete, but the circumstances surrounding actual "in the field" conditions are far from our control.

Weather, supply availability, government paperwork, and progress of community involvement are just a few of the variables that can delay (and sometimes speed up) a project's completion.

We will always tell you if anything changes. And, if you get a notice like this – it’s actually further proof your gifts are being carefully used towards a water project that lasts.