Dirty water kills 72,000 children under the age of five each year. That’s almost 200 kids every single day. Old enough to attend kindergarten, these little ones never even make it to school. All because the water they sip after a meal or playtime preys on their bodies, robbing them of the chance to have a childhood or a future.

Yet, their mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers walk for 200 million collective hours every day, looking for water. Carrying buckets as heavy as 34 kilos, these women walk 6 kilometres on an average roundtrip to fetch water. In what they manage to find, faecal contamination is often a given, since goats, cows, and camels tramp through the same water. Setting in motion the never-ending cycle of disease, malnutrition and even loss of life.

The trouble is when we read numbers like 72,000, we have a tendency to shut down. It’s hard to imagine the suffering that water insecurity inflicts upon children who suffer due to water-borne illnesses and of the mothers who lose their children to such diseases. So, let’s start with one. Because one more child with clean water brings 72,000 down to 71,999. And one by one we can bring clean water to children across the globe.

Atro is a good example. He is no longer one of the 72,000 under-fives at the risk of water-related diseases and can now enjoy his childhood the way he should.

Here’s the good news; the water crisis is solvable, and we know how to bring sustainable access to clean water to those who need it. We recognize that the water we provide becomes the life-source of the communities, so sustainability is at the heart of everything we do. We monitor all our kiosks remotely on a real-time basis and secure water revenue from each kiosk to pay for repairs in case the need arises. In the unlikely event of a kiosk malfunction, our technical teams restore kiosk operations within three days, ensuring 95% uptime of each Maji site. You would be amazed to learn how a sustainable supply of clean water changes everything in the communities we serve. Our post-impact surveys reveal that water-borne illness drop to a flat 0%, school and work attendance go up and women and girls are able to access clean water just a short stroll away from their front doors.

It takes AED 60,000 to bring sustainable safe water access to one community and only AED 75 to bring lifetime access to one person. Give as much as you can and help us change lives with sustainable access to safe water.

Head-quartered in Dubai, Project Maji is an official member of the International Humanitarian City. We are a pan-African safe water enterprise, working to provide sustainable access to clean water for rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Since 2015, Project Maji has served thousands of people with millions of litres of safe water pumped through our 67 solar-powered water kiosks across Ghana and Kenya. Declared winners of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award 2020 under the “Innovative Research and Development” category, we are well on our way scaling for impact and reaching our goal to serve 1 million people with sustainable access to safe water by the year 2025.