Water - the gift of life - for children in Darfur

Children of the villages in Darfur, Sudan often have to walk miles and miles across the hot sandy desert for every drop of clean water. Imagine having to miss a day of school, just to get enough water for your family?   In the summer months, many children cannot go to school at all because of the desperate need for water.

Kids for Kids have been working for the past 20 years to provide clean, drinkable and easily accessible water to remote villages in Darfur.   Among our many grassroots projects, we install clean water handpumps in this troubled region where many other charities refuse to work or are not allowed to operate. We fence in our handpumps to keep animals away to keep the water clean and add a trough outside the fence so that they too can drink! We provide water carts and jerrycans to store water.

We train village committees and set up local funding mechanisms so that repairs can be carried out and the water can keep flowing long term. This is real sustainable change. Once the handpump is working, children no longer have to walk for water and can go to school. This transforms their entire future. Families can plant trees and grow vegetables, breaking the cycle of starvation and lifting them out of poverty.

Although Kids for Kids have managed to support over 100 villages over two decades, there are still villagers having to travel up to 20 miles for water in the summer months when the water table goes deep down and every drop of surface water has long since dried. Our most recent report from Hillat Hashab highlighted exactly this. They put in a request for a hand pump as many of the women and children in the village face exactly this challenge, every day of their lives.

This continued need for support highlights how valuable donations are for our water projects. No child, family or community should go without clean, accessible water. A new water pump for a village costs £6,500, which seems like a lot of money, but can there really be a cost put on access to clean water?

Please donate what you can, in order to reach this goal. Being able to provide a water pump to those who are living without clean water is giving someone the gift of life. The gift of a basic human right that we take for granted every day. 

Be the change you wish to see, support the water projects in Darfur and donate what you can, and please share our project with friends and family. Every donation, however small, helps to bring about change. The villagers of Hillat Hashab will thank you.