Local clean drinking water should be seen as a necessity to life. Many clean water charities help to provide this but often, once they have installed a pump, it breaks down never to be used again. We have a team of volunteer Kenyan engineers who repair broken hand-pumps across Kenya, providing long-term sustainable clean drinking water to many thousands of people. As of November 2024, the team has reinstated more than 2700 hand-pumps, benefitting over 750,00 people, including schools, clinics and villages.
Repairing other charities’ hand pumps.
There are over 32,000 hand pumps in Kenya, around 30% are broken and non-functional. Each year, we restore 200 – 300 and offer training to the local communities on how to maintain them. As well as providing access to groundwater, the object of the project is to keep the hand pumps working for the next 10 years and not just until the next breakdown. Each repair costs around £200 -£800, depending upon the resources required for the repair. Some are cheap to repair, just requiring a few replacement parts whereas others need a new handpump and possibly work on the well or borehole. Typically, around 50 – 100 families rely on the water from each hand pump, along with any neighbouring schools and clinics. The long term average cost per user of refurbishing a pump is around £1 – so to help 10,000 people costs around £10,000 ($14,000).
We split Kenya into 9 separate counties for pump repairs, and have a team of 9 volunteers, each undertaking multiple repairs every month.
Funding for the hand pump repair project during 2025 will be mainly from the Eagle Foundation. We also have other donors, and a legacy fund from David Wilson.
With more funding, we can repair more pumps.
Benefits of local clean water.
The benefits of clean water are obvious; less disease and in some cases death. In the Maasai areas, dirty drinking water is the norm. It is the women and young girls’ role to fetch the water. A typical water container is 20L (20 Kgms) and this may be carried up to 7-8 miles each way, or 14-16 miles total. A girl who has the job of fetching water from 7 miles away will not have any time to attend school. There is a high correlation between closeness of water and school attendance for girls.
Turning sunlight into water
One of the Charity’s early projects was the building of 2 deep solar powered bore-holes, one at our school and the other about 5km from it. The school bore-hole is 160m deep (500′) and 4,000-12,000 litre are pumped each day just using the power of the sun. The bore-hole supplies the school and local community. The greatest need for water is during the hot, sunny dry season; the time when the solar powered pump gives the greatest water.
The other bore-hole is 180m deep and provides water to the community and a 1 acre vegetable growing plot. The plot is split into 80 allotments for the poorest in the community to grow food. Just using the power of the sun, the solar pump can provide up to 20,000L per day.
