Since 2009, we have assisted 138 Malawian villages to construct and maintain water points, providing safe drinking water for 22,300 people; supported 4,880 families to build hygienic latrines; helped a primary school with 300 students to build two blocks of latrines; and run hygiene awareness sessions for 8,500 people. Our household surveys have found that the projects have helped to dramatically reduce the percentage of children under five suffering from diarrhoea in the previous 2 weeks from 14.5% to 4%.

Water Works focuses its programme in the Traditional Authority (TA) of Bwatalika (formerly demarcated as TA Malili), about 20km west of Malawi’s capital city of Lilongwe. The area receives little assistance from the government or other NGOs despite, prior to our intervention, over half of the villages not having access to safe drinking water and most households not having a latrine.

Our approach is not to give hand outs, but to empower people to meet their water, sanitation and hygiene needs. We do this by:

• promoting improved hygiene awareness and practice
• assisting the communities to install, manage and maintain one of our simple, innovative and sustainable water pump technologies
• supporting vulnerable households to construct latrines and hand-washing systems

• planting trees, providing fruit for individual households and wood for fuel