This is the Face of Clean Water
When it comes down to it, we’re all about people, just like our name says. Stories of people’s lives changed by safe water and sanitation inspire us to keep at it, day after day. Your generosity has changed millions of lives around the world. Here are some of their stories.
- All
- Bolivia
- Guatemala
- Honduras
- India
- Malawi
- Nicaragua
- Peru
- Rwanda
- Uganda
- Sanitation
- Sustainability
- Water
- Women & Girls

Changing Lives
One Toilet
at a Time
Seema Devi was married as a teenager. At this young age, she moved to her new husband’s village, away from her family. One of the biggest differences in this new village in the Sheohar district of northern India was that she no longer had a toilet in her home.

Local Water Guardians:
The Water
Sellers
Laban spends his days overseeing the local water point as community members fetch water. He is the water seller and caretaker of the local hand pump.
Water For People’s Water As A Business model employs water sellers like Laban.

Small but Mighty
The story of one determined teacher who has changed the future of water for an entire community.

Micrometers: A Simple Solution to Water Scarcity
In the small community of Llimbe in Peru, water sources were running dry. The idea proposed by the water committee was to add micrometers to each household’s water connection, however some in the community were skeptical.

Don Michael:
Rebuilding a water system
Michael Sagastegui is the president of the water committee in Pampas de San Isidro in the district of Cascas, Peru. As committee president, he oversees maintenance and repair of the water system.

Doña Maria:
Washed-away
livelihood
Washed-away
livelihood
High in Peru’s Andes Mountains, Maria Montalvo Arce grows grapes.
Well, most years she grows grapes. A year ago, the worst flooding Peru has experienced in a lifetime washed away nearly all of Maria’s harvest. The rain lasted for a month.

Don Ángel: Protecting a
District’s Water
District’s Water
Don Ángel went from being a zoologist who worked with livestock to leading the water and sanitation office in the province of Gran Chimu de Cascas in Peru.

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.

Chapananga 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.

Local Leaders
Championing Forever
Without leaders on the ground and in local, district, and national governments championing water services for Everyone Forever, the wells and pumps don’t mean much. When they break, who will fix them?

A Triple Force
for Hygiene
Angel, Elizabeth, and Sylvia are a triple force for hygiene promotion at their school in Blantyre, Malawi. The girls are triplets, and they’re all in the school sanitation club. "Water is important because it helps us keep our bodies healthy,"

The Equation
for Better Hygiene
Combine baking soda, oil, and extract from a local Malawian tree, and it equals better hygiene for an entire community.

Maureen
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.

The Shop Owner
Every day at 7 am, Cementi Mendozo opens his grocery store in a local trading center in Chikwawa District, Malawi.

Sanitation Clubs:
Making Back to School Better
"Okay, let me give you an example of why water and sanitation in schools are important." David’s excitement is palpable. He’s a member of the Chilomoni Primary School’s Sanitation Club in Blantyre, Malawi.

Water Starts with Data
At Water For People, we pay careful attention to the numbers behind our work – because data shows us the impact and illuminates our next steps.

Prosperity
Through
Poop
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
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.

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.

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.

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.

The Impact
of Saved Time
of Saved Time
Beatrice and her neighbors have an acute understanding of the value of time. Three years ago, women and children in her community of Ngoma in Rulindo District, Rwanda, were losing hours every day fetching water from an unprotected spring.

Water Means
Change for
Communities
"Children and teachers walked from school to a well near our house to get water and carry it back," said Mayra, who lives with her husband Hector and their two young sons Marcos and Anthony. "They needed water to clean the school, and teachers and students needed it to use the bathroom and wash their hands."
Change for
Communities
"Children and teachers walked from school to a well near our house to get water and carry it back," said Mayra, who lives with her husband Hector and their two young sons Marcos and Anthony. "They needed water to clean the school, and teachers and students needed it to use the bathroom and wash their hands."

The Smallest Students
Make Big Changes
The kindergarten in the picturesque town of Nueva Granada, Honduras has reliable water and sanitation services. It wasn’t always this way at the school, shares Dora Ramos, the school’s director.

There’s Something
Life Changing in the Water
Saturnino Días is 50-years-old, but he claims to have more energy than men half his age. A farmer, he has been working the soil since he was five years old. He and the Honduran land have a close relationship. The land depends on him to cultivate its capacity, and he depends on the land to give him the harvest he needs to live.

Water Brings a New Hope
When Maria Lopez decided to move in with her husband’s family to the rural community of Nueva Esperanza in San Antonio de Cortés, Honduras, the residents there were on the verge of naming it "El Olvido"- the forgotten place.

A Born Leader
Don Goyo has led the charge for safe water in his rural community in the hilly terrain of Western Guatemala. From a young age, he looked for problems to solve and ways to make life better for Everyone in his community. In many ways, making life better started with water.

A Sanitation
Revolution
Pablo Terceros Vargas is sparking a sanitation revolution in his rural community in Bolivia. Pablo has lived in the district of Tiraque, Bolivia for his entire life. For the first 32 years of his life, he didn’t have a bathroom.

Change Starts
at Schools
Pablo has lived in the district of Tiraque, Bolivia for his entire life. For the first 32 years of his life, he didn’t have a bathroom.

Students are Part of the Solution
Both Maribel and David are dreaming of going to university next year – Maribel wants to be a nurse or social worker, and David plans to study mechanics. One of the reasons they are able to dream about heading off to university is because they go to a school that has safe water and sanitation. They never had to miss school due to fetching water or being sick from water-borne diseases.