The Water Project, Inc.

The Water Project is focused on providing reliable, ongoing water and sanitation service and support to communities around the world who suffer needlessly from a lack of access to clean water and proper sanitation.

The Water Project invests in safe water and sanitation projects that benefit small rural and urban communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Who We Serve

Nearly 1 billion people still lack access to safe water worldwide. While governments and larger NGOs often focus in urban and peri-urban centers, our work focuses on the least and last served in the rural countryside of Kenya, Uganda, and Sierra Leone.

Providing access to clean, safe water helps capable and determined people realize the hope they have for their own futures and has a dramatic, measurable impact in four key areas.

Education: Key to future development
443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related diseases. When students are healthy, they can study. When students are freed from gathering water, they return to class. With proper and safe latrines, girls stay in school through their teenage years.

Food security: Knowing where your next meal is
84% of the people who don't have access to improved water live in rural areas, where they live principally through subsistence agriculture. Access to water reduces crop loss. Schools can feed students with gardens, reducing costs. Crop production drives economic development.

Health: Clean water...clean hands
In developing countries, as much as 80% of illnesses are linked to poor water and sanitation conditions. With better access to water and sanitation, time lost to sickness is reduced and people can get back to the work of lifting themselves out of poverty.

Poverty: A symptom of broken foundations.
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! Lack of access to water hobbles development. Access to water is the foundation of almost any effort to grow. Access to water unlocks people's true potential. It can break the cycle of poverty. The communities we serve are ready to grow. We can't wait to see how they choose to do it.

Here at Home
We create tools, educational materials, and media that individuals, small groups, businesses, schools, and churches can use to learn about, act on, and then see the tangible impact they can have by providing access to clean water.

Proving It
We believe that everyone should see every outcome, every time. We publish the results of each water project, as it happens, to our online directory. GPS-based maps, photos, and stories from the specific community they served are shared with every donor to a water project.

Providing safe water through new wells, rehabilitated wells, sand dams, rain catchment systems, and spring protection schemes is combined with thorough hygiene and sanitation training to ensure maximum health and economic benefits are achieved in a particular community.

We recognize that simply providing one-time access to safe water does not produce the kind of impact that is often portrayed alongside work like ours. Water doesn't change anything. People do.

Knowing this, The Water Project works within our global network to ensure that the communities we serve deeply engage in their water projects from day one. This commitment to building relationships is crucial to instilling the values and education necessary for a community to manage and maintain a water point over time. At the same time, we work hard to avoid creating unhealthy dependencies that might otherwise undermine the long-term impact of any water point.

Since no one partner or implementer can master every aspect of water provision and community development, another of our primary objectives is to provide a conduit for information sharing and best practice development. To accomplish this, we maintain a portfolio of partners with varying skill levels and specializations.

Over time, our global network grows and learns from one another with our assistance and investment. One example might be sharing community training materials across our program that one partner has created and finds particularly effective. Another might be discussing the sourcing of water project components or construction techniques.

The truth is, anyone can dig a hole. Anyone can send money to Africa to fund a well. Anyone can take a picture of water flowing and claim success. But it takes trained and committed teams working in collaboration to build a water project on a strong foundation that ensures lasting worth and life-changing impact.

A comprehensive, sustainable water project costs time, commitment, investment in people, a willingness to measure and admit both success and failures, and a passion to care for people more than hardware.

The Water Project has worked for over 15 years to develop resources to inspire investment in this work, to identify and develop strategic and valuable relationships with our implementing partners, and to understand the true impact of our efforts.

Our program staff are well trained and have many years of experience in water project implementation and evaluation. Working both in the field and from our base in the U.S. they regularly engage with our partners to learn and to teach. Working on collaborative teams with other NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) in the Water and Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) Sector, our staff constantly improves our capabilities and reach.

Our relationship with local leaders is perhaps our best asset. Our local teams know the people and places we serve. They are our eyes, ears, and hands. Our job is to provide them with the resources they need to focus on their excellent work. By distilling new information, best practices, and methods of impact assessment for them, we can achieve efficiencies that translate to more people being served.

Our supporters generate the funds needed to do it all. Nearly 100% of our funding comes from public donations. Individuals, small groups, businesses, schools, and churches raise funds to build water projects. We show everyone the specific impact of their gifts through GPS-based maps, photos, and stories from the community they served.

To date, The Water Project has funded over 3,000 water projects in seven countries with nine partners. Over 843,150 people have access to safe water. Today, these communities are breaking the cycle of poverty.

We have received countless stories of gardens being planted, children returning to class, test scores improving, health recovering, and more. The time returned to women and girls especially, relieved from gathering water from long distances, is returning large dividends in their families and villages.

Recently, a hospital in Western Kenya leveraged our investment in drilling a borehole well by connecting it to the building's internal plumbing - installed decades ago but never connected to a water source! The maternity ward is now properly cleaned, patients have a safe source of drinking water, and the doctors and nurses work with a renewed vision of hope.

There are many other great stories to tell.

But there is also much left to be accomplished. We are continuing to strengthen our internal processes and to quantify our impact better. We're adding staff to meet the administrative demand of tracking hundreds of projects. We are developing our next strategic plan to refocus our efforts where the greatest impact is being seen.

Developing our implementing teams is a never-ending process by design. The work of building local capacity means not beginning at perfection. As each partner matures, we'll add new implementers to help extend our reach. All along the way, we are constantly improving and sharing what we learn.

Still, countless communities lack access to clean, safe water. To meet the demand, we need significant additional investment. We're working with our current supporters to deepen their commitment to this work and to introduce us to others who can help. And we're constantly seeking new ways to engage people with the cause of clean water.