Archive for August 2019
The Sanitation Shop in Cascas
Water For People takes a market-based approach to sanitation. Rather than provide toilet hand-outs, we support entrepreneurs to provide sanitation products and services. This approach is more sustainable, and creates jobs and lifts local economies along the way.
Read MoreChapananga is Open Defecation Free
The 216 villages in the Traditional Authority of Chapananga in Chikwawa District in Malawi have been declared open defecation free – a huge milestone for the district, and for Water For People.
Read MoreThe Equation for Better Hygiene
Combine baking soda, oil, and extract from a local Malawian tree, and it equals better hygiene for an entire community.
Read MoreMaureen the Hand Pump Mechanic
On any given day, as she sees her kids off to school or prepares food for her family, Maureen could get a call from a community in her region. She’d drop everything in that moment, grab her tools, and head off on her bicycle.
Read MoreThe Shop Owner
Every day at 7 am, Cementi Mendozo opens his grocery store in a local trading center in Chikwawa District, Malawi.
Read MoreProsperity Through Poop
John overcame poverty through poop businesses.
That’s right, you read that correctly.
“My parents were very poor,” John says. “I tried to go to school but my uniforms were so torn that I looked almost naked. Friends would laugh at me, and I decided to stop school.”
Surviving Cholera and Changing the Future
Annie sits outside of her mud-plastered home, a small thatched canopy providing little respite from the Malawi heat. Her gaze focuses on some scribbled words on the side of her latrine: Tigwiritse Nchito Chimbuzi Moyenera Nthawi Zonse.
Let’s use the latrine properly at all times.
Read More
A Better Toilet,
a Better Life
a Better Life
Folomina’s face lights up when she talks about her toilet. Two years ago, the state of water and sanitation in Folomina’s village was dire. She and the other 20 families in her community would walk two hours each day for water. The sanitation situation was just as bad.
Read More
A Dream of
Safe Water
Safe Water
“It was like a dream to us,” says Lilian. She says the people in her community never thought they would have safe water. “We used to wake up very early in the morning to go fetch water,” Lilian says. She and others in her community in Gicumbi District, Rwanda would lose hours each day walking to fetch water for the day’s tasks.
Read More
There’s something
extraordinary in the water
extraordinary in the water
Sweetly sleeping, two-year-old Solange lays contentedly in her mom’s arms. Marie Louise’s other children are at school. This scene, almost serene, feels very different from what Marie Louise says life looked like a few years ago. A few years ago, her village didn’t have a safe water source.
Read More