Basic water service
45%
of schools in sub-Saharan Africa had basic drinking water service in 2023.
A school without clean water is a place where learning is constantly interrupted. Students miss class because they are sick, or because they’ve spent the morning walking long distances to collect water. For girls, the lack of privacy and hygiene during their periods often means staying home, sometimes for days at a time. What should be a place of growth becomes a place of barriers, and over time, those missed opportunities shape the future of entire communities.
For those who depend on the land, water is everything. When it is scarce or unreliable, crops struggle to grow, and livestock suffer, turning what should be a season of harvest into one of uncertainty. Small farmers may work tirelessly in their fields yet still face empty yields and difficult choices about how to provide. The lack of water doesn’t just affect crops; it affects meals, income, and the stability families depend on.
The burden of unsafe water falls most heavily on women and girls. More often than not, they rise early and walk long distances each day to collect water, often carrying heavy containers over rough terrain. This daily responsibility takes a toll-physically, emotionally, and in lost time that could be spent in school, at work, or with family. In the end, unsafe water does more than threaten health; it steals time, limits opportunity, and makes it harder for women and girls to build the futures they deserve.
The lack of access to clean water in Africa is not just an inconvenience; it is a serious health crisis. When families are forced to rely on contaminated water, they are exposed to waterborne diseases and infections that lead to dehydration, malnutrition, and impaired growth in children. Too often, these preventable conditions become life-threatening, especially for children under five.
The burden of unsafe water reaches into every part of life. Parents lose days of work to sickness or spend hours walking long distances just to bring water home. Money that could support a family or grow a small business is redirected to medical care. For farmers, the unreliable water means poor harvests and uncertain income. Long-term, this daily struggle becomes a cycle that limits opportunity, keeping families and communities from moving forward.
A school without clean water is a place where learning is constantly interrupted. Students miss class because they are sick, or because they’ve spent the morning walking long distances to collect water. For girls, the lack of privacy and hygiene during their periods often means staying home, sometimes for days at a time. What should be a place of growth becomes a place of barriers, and over time, those missed opportunities shape the future of entire communities.
For those who depend on the land, water is everything. When it is scarce or unreliable, crops struggle to grow, and livestock suffer, turning what should be a season of harvest into one of uncertainty. Small farmers may work tirelessly in their fields yet still face empty yields and difficult choices about how to provide. The lack of water doesn’t just affect crops; it affects meals, income, and the stability families depend on.
The burden of unsafe water falls most heavily on women and girls. More often than not, they rise early and walk long distances each day to collect water, often carrying heavy containers over rough terrain. This daily responsibility takes a toll-physically, emotionally, and in lost time that could be spent in school, at work, or with family. In the end, unsafe water does more than threaten health; it steals time, limits opportunity, and makes it harder for women and girls to build the futures they deserve.
The lack of access to clean water in Africa is not just an inconvenience; it is a serious health crisis. When families are forced to rely on contaminated water, they are exposed to waterborne diseases and infections that lead to dehydration, malnutrition, and impaired growth in children. Too often, these preventable conditions become life-threatening, especially for children under five.
The burden of unsafe water reaches into every part of life. Parents lose days of work to sickness or spend hours walking long distances just to bring water home. Money that could support a family or grow a small business is redirected to medical care. For farmers, the unreliable water means poor harvests and uncertain income. Long-term, this daily struggle becomes a cycle that limits opportunity, keeping families and communities from moving forward.
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When a school has no safe water, the day is shaped around its absence. Waterborne illness keeps children home. Time that should be spent learning is lost to fetching water, waiting for water, or managing without it. And for girls, the lack of private, functioning facilities can turn menstruation into missed days month after month. These are some of the first barriers reliable water helps remove.
45%
of schools in sub-Saharan Africa had basic drinking water service in 2023.
37%
of schools in sub-Saharan Africa had basic hygiene service in 2023.
11%
of schools had bins for menstrual waste in girls' toilets.
Clean water does not solve every challenge a school faces, but it removes one of the most basic barriers to learning. Illness drops. Handwashing becomes part of the daily routine. Girls gain more privacy and dignity through the school day. And when water is reliable, the school can function with fewer interruptions and more consistency for students, teachers, and families alike.
This is why water sources matters. A reliable, solar-powered community well continues to serve through dry seasons and changing conditions, helping schools and the wider community depend on water that lasts
When a school has dependable water nearby, the impact does not stop at the school gate. Families benefit. Teachers benefit. Daily life becomes more stable. A water source that serves multiple taps and more than one need helps strengthen the entire community around the school.
Your gift helps fund the kind of water source that keeps serving year after year — so students can spend more time learning, girls can attend with greater dignity, and entire communities can rely on water that keeps flowing.
For families who depend on the land, water is not one input among many — it is everything. When it is scarce or unreliable, crops weaken, livestock suffer, and a season that should have brought food and income instead brings worry. Farmers can work hard every day and still watch the harvest slip away if the water does not come. The loss is never only in the field—it reaches the table, school fees, animals, and the stability a family was counting on.
Across the region, most farming still depends on the rain. When it comes late, falls short, or does not come at all, there is often no backup. Crops fail. Animals weaken. A family can lose the food and income it expected to depend on for the whole year. One dry season can mean months of hunger, debt, and impossible choices between meals, school costs, and selling off the very livestock meant to carry them through.
Rainfed
95%
of Africa's farmland depends entirely on rain, with no reliable water to fall back on.
More than
60%
of people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on farming for their food and income.
Lean season
4 months
a year without enough food for families who face a drier-than-average season.
With water
3x
the harvest some farmers see after switching to reliable, solar-powered irrigation.
Reliable water changes farming from a gamble into something a family can plan around. It can turn one fragile harvest into a dependable one — and often into more than one, as farmers are able to grow through the dry season instead of waiting helplessly on the rain. Crops grow stronger. Livestock stay healthier. Food lasts longer. And what comes from the land becomes income a family can count on, not just hope for.
The farmers most trapped by the rain-fed gamble are often the ones with limited options to begin with. Rain cannot be controlled. Diesel pumps are expensive to run, difficult to maintain, and out of reach for many families. A deep, solar-powered community well changes that equation. It provides dependable water for crops, livestock, and daily life — drawn by the sun, flowing through dry seasons, and serving a community long after one rainy season has passed. It does not just save one harvest. It does not just save one harvest; it gives people the chance to plan, plant, and build a future with more confidence.
When water is reliable, farming stops being a yearly gamble and starts becoming a future. Your gift helps fund the kind of lasting water source that keeps fields productive, livestock alive, and families fed — season after season, year after year.
The burden of unsafe water falls most heavily on women and girls. More often than not, they are the ones who rise early, walk long distances, and carry heavy containers home day after day. That burden is not only physical. It steals time, drains strength, and narrows what a girl or a woman is free to do with her life. Hours that could have gone to school, work, rest, or family are spent on a task no one should have to build their day around. Unsafe water does more than threaten health — it limits opportunity, dignity, and the freedom to choose what comes next.
In homes without water nearby, it is most often women and girls who carry the responsibility. They wake early, walk to a distant source, wait, fill heavy containers, and carry them back — often more than once in a single day. It is exhausting and unequal. The burden falls on them not because they have more time to spare, but because the work has long been placed on their shoulders. Every hour spent getting water is an hour taken from school, income, rest, and the simple chance to be fully present in their own lives.
Every day
200M
hours women and girls spend collecting water every single day across sub-Saharan Africa.
The burden
80%
of households without water nearby rely on women and girls to go and fetch it.
School
1 in 10
schoolgirls in Africa miss class or drop out for lack of water, toilets, and privacy during their period.
Safety
40%
higher risk of assault for women without a safe, private place to use a toilet.
The harm does not end with lost time. Without clean water and a private toilet, a monthly period can become a reason to stay home from school. Missed days turn into falling behind, and falling behind too often results in leaving school altogether. The danger can also be physical. Girls and women who must walk long distances for water, or seek privacy after dark, face a documented risk of harassment and assault. Safe water close to home is not only a convenience—it is dignity, protection, and the difference between moving freely through the day and living with constant vulnerability.
When clean water arrives at the heart of a community, the long walk begins to disappear — and with it, hours of every day are given back. Girls have a better chance to stay in school. Women gain time, strength, and flexibility to invest in work, rest, caregiving, and family life. A deep, solar-powered community well does more than provide water—it brings safety closer, restores dignity, and gives women and girls back something that is too often taken from them: the power to shape their own future.
When the only water source in a community is contaminated, every drink is a risk. It carries the bacteria and parasites behind diarrhea, cholera, and typhoid — illnesses that, for a small child, can turn deadly in a matter of days. A reliable, clean water source removes that danger at its source: the water itself.
When water is contaminated with human or animal waste, it carries the organisms that cause diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. For adults it means days of illness. For a young child it can mean far worse: diarrhea drains the body of the water and eletrolytes it needs to survive, causing severe dehydration which can take a life in a matter of days. The very act of drinking water to survive becomes the thing that makes an entire family sick.
Roughly
60M
children in Eastern & Southern Africa are drinking unsafe water.
More than
178,000
cholera cases across Eastern & Southern Africa in just over a year.
115
people die every hour in the African Region from causes linked to poor sanitation.
Repeated bouts of waterborne illness do more than make a child sick again and again. Each episode robs a growing body of nutrition, and chronic illness in early childhood can leave lasting marks on a child’s growth and development. Unsafe water doesn’t only take lives — it can quietly hold back the children who survive it.
This is why a lasting water source matters so much. A solar-powered well drilled deep into safe groundwater keeps delivering clean water through dry seasons and floods alike — exactly the conditions in which contaminated surface water spreads disease fastest. It doesn’t protect health once. It protects it every single day.
Cholera, typhoid, and deadly diarrhea are not mysteries — they spread through unsafe water, and they stop where clean water begins. Your gift helps replace a dangerous water source with a safe, lasting one, and protects a community’s health for years to come.
The cost of unsafe water reaches into every part of life. Parents lose work when illness keeps a child home or pulls them away from earning. Hours disappear into the walk for water. Money that could feed a family, pay school fees, or grow a small business is spent on medicine, transport, or buying water at a high price. For farmers, unreliable water means weaker harvests and uncertain income. Over time, this daily pressure becomes a trap — one that keeps families working hard just to stay in place.
For a household without reliable water, the cost is paid again and again. Time is lost to the daily trip to fetch it. Income disappears when sickness keeps adults from work or children from school. Scarce money is spent treating preventable illness or buying water instead of covering food, savings, livestock, or school costs. For poor families, unsafe water is not just a hardship. It is a constant financial drain — one that makes progress harder with every passing day.
Every year
$200B
lost across Africa to the toll of unsafe water and poor sanitation.
Africa's GDP
5%
of Africa's GDP is drained annually by inadequate water and sanitation.
Household
20%
of a poor family's income can go to buying water when there is no safe source nearby.
The return
$7
returned for every $1 invested in clean water — in health, productivity, and income.
What drains one household eventually drains an entire community. When millions of people lose hours to fetching water and days to preventable illness, the effects show up everywhere — in wages not earned, businesses that stay small, students who fall behind, and local economies that never reach their potential. Across Africa, the losses add up to staggering sums. But behind those numbers are ordinary families whose effort is being swallowed by a problem that has a solution.
Clean water does more than relieve suffering — it changes what is economically possible. Every dollar invested in safe water and sanitation creates returns in stronger workdays, lower medical costs, more consistent school attendance, healthier livestock, and room for small businesses to grow. A deep, solar-powered community well is exactly that kind of investment: built to last, powered by the sun, and able to keep delivering value year after year. It turns a daily drain into a foundation a community can build on.
