Clean Water in Mwiki: What We're Actually Doing About an Unreliable Supply

In Mwiki, a fast-growing neighbourhood inside Kasarani Constituency, water is a daily negotiation for many households. County supply is intermittent, and when it fails, families fall back on vendors selling from handcarts at prices that spike whenever the rains fail. We want to be upfront about something: we are a small, newly registered community organisation, and we have not built water infrastructure ourselves. What we have done is start mapping the problem properly, and using that information to push for a real fix through the right channels.

What We've Actually Found

As part of the household register we keep for our other programmes, volunteers have started noting which households report the worst and most frequent water access problems, alongside what they're currently paying vendors during dry spells. This isn't a formal survey with statistical rigour, it's the kind of ground-level pattern our home-visit and outreach volunteers are well placed to notice simply by asking the households they're already in contact with.

Why We're Not Claiming to Have Solved This

A solar-powered kiosk, boreholes, storage tanks, this kind of infrastructure requires capital and technical partnership well beyond what a CBO at our current stage can deliver on our own. We'd rather say that plainly than overstate our own capacity. What we can realistically do, and are doing, is document the problem accurately, share it with the Kasarani sub-county water office, and support any resident-led effort to negotiate for better coverage.

Practical Support in the Meantime

While formal infrastructure sits outside what we can deliver ourselves, we do run basic water-safety guidance alongside our other health and hygiene sessions, covering safe storage and simple purification methods for households relying on vendor-supplied water of uncertain quality. It's a modest intervention next to the scale of the underlying problem, but it's honest about what we can actually offer right now.

What We're Asking For

If you have expertise in small-scale water infrastructure, or a connection to an organisation that funds this kind of project, we'd welcome the introduction. We're not in a position to promise a kiosk or a borehole. We are in a position to bring an accurate, well-documented picture of where the need is greatest in Mwiki to whoever might be able to help deliver it.

How We First Started Documenting the Problem

The mapping effort began almost by accident, as volunteers conducting other household visits started noticing how often water access came up unprompted in conversation. Rather than treating these as isolated complaints, we started logging them consistently in our household register, which over time revealed a clearer picture than any single conversation could have on its own, showing specific streets and clusters of households facing the worst and most frequent disruptions.

What We've Learned About the County Water Office Process

Approaching the county water office as a registered CBO with documented evidence, rather than as individual residents making informal complaints, has changed how seriously our inquiries are received. We've learned that specific, dated records of disruption carry more weight in these conversations than general frustration, however justified, and that lesson has shaped how carefully we now log every water-related concern.

Why We Haven't Pursued a Borehole Ourselves

We've been asked more than once why we don't simply raise funds to drill a borehole rather than lobby for existing infrastructure improvements. The honest answer is that a properly sited, maintained borehole requires technical expertise, ongoing maintenance capacity, and capital well beyond a young CBO's current resources, and we'd rather advocate for a solution likely to be sustainable than attempt one we couldn't properly maintain ourselves.

What Residents Have Told Us They Actually Need Most

Beyond the underlying infrastructure problem, several residents have told us that simply knowing someone is tracking the issue, and occasionally following up with the county office, matters to them even before any concrete change happens. That feedback has reinforced our sense that consistent attention, not just an eventual fix, has value on its own.

How This Connects to Our Hygiene Work

Unreliable water access directly affects how consistently households can practise the handwashing habits we teach elsewhere in our health work. It's part of why we treat this water access problem as connected to our broader health mandate, not a separate infrastructure issue outside our concern.