Get answers to your questions about our work, how we’re run and managing your support for Tanwater Foundation.
Access to clean water and toilets is a human right, and should be a normal part of daily life for everyone, everywhere.
With our local partners, we work with communities to build low-cost, sustainable solutions that meet their needs.
We also work with local and Tanzania government where we operate, developing solutions to help them provide water, toilets and hygiene to everyone.
Many people live in Tanzania where the national economy is too poor to create water and toilet infrastructure at the scale they need. Construction can also be difficult in many places because of extreme geography like deserts, mountains and jungle and a lack of trained experts who know how to find long-term solutions.
Governments may also let water and toilets get left behind while focusing on other important priorities, like industry, roads, schools and hospitals.
Vulnerable people in society are affected most by this lack of water and toilets. Those living in hard-to-reach areas can be forgotten entirely, poor people can be priced out, and groups perceived as different can be denied access to them. We work with these communities to help them defend their rights and gain the water and toilets they deserve.
But both of these solutions are unsafe, directly leading to the spread of deadly diseases. Wells that aren’t dug correctly can be extremely dangerous to people’s health, and human waste in the open can spread disease and contaminate the water table.
Constructing safe wells and toilets requires more specialist knowledge than communities are likely to have. So our local partners work with them to build simple, effective long-term solutions, and teach the skills to maintain them, too
Open sources of water are rarely safe. When open to nature they can be contaminated with household and industrial waste, animal feces, parasites and waterborne diseases like cholera.
They are also unreliable, drying up or running out. This means needing to find a new source, which could be many miles away. A community cannot move every time this happens.
Land ownership is also an issue for most people; poor communities lack the money to simply move to new locations, let alone find new work or land to farm.
It is therefore much better and safer to create a water facility that is local, using water that needs only minimal filtering like groundwater or rainwater and owned collectively by a community.
Open sources of water are rarely safe. When open to nature they can be contaminated with household and industrial waste, animal feces, parasites and waterborne diseases like cholera.
They are also unreliable, drying up or running out. This means needing to find a new source, which could be many miles away. A community cannot move every time this happens.
Land ownership is also an issue for most people; poor communities lack the money to simply move to new locations, let alone find new work or land to farm.
It is therefore much better and safer to create a water facility that is local, using water that needs only minimal filtering like groundwater or rainwater and owned collectively by a community.