Why Kenya, and what we've built there

Kenya has made significant progress on water access — about 68% of Kenyans now use safe drinking water — but a third of the country still doesn't, and the gap concentrates in rural and dryland communities. Only 56% of rural Kenyans have access to improved drinking water sources, and just 15% of rural households have piped water at home. In the country's arid and semi-arid drylands, the picture is sharper still: more than 90% of open water sources in drought-affected regions are either depleted or have dried up entirely, and shared use by people and livestock turns the ones that remain into routes for waterborne disease. In 2024, we funded a project in Ndarakwa to help close that gap.

The intervention is a deep borehole — more than 1,000 feet down — drilled to reach groundwater far below the seasonal, contaminated surface sources that local children had been walking long distances to use. Going that deep is deliberate: shallow wells in this kind of landscape often dry out in drought or pick up contamination from nearby waste sources, while a deep borehole reaches an aquifer that's both reliable and far less exposed to surface pollution.

"We now have enough for drinking, bathing, washing clothes and even for watering our crops on the farm... We no longer experience water shortages." — Tabitha's caregivers, Ndarakwa, Kenya

Kenya has shown up as one of our coffee origins in the past, specifically one of our featured World Wonders roasts. Keep an eye out for more Kenyan coffee in the future! Until then, every bag we sell from Uganda, Nicaragua, and our World Wonders microlots helps fund work like this.