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Ask any resident of Mwiki Sub-Location what their biggest daily challenge is, and water is rarely far from the top of the list. Not the absence of water entirely — most households can find some source, whether a shared tap, a vendor with a handcart, or a borehole a few streets away — but the absence of water that is close, affordable, and safe to drink without gambling with your family's health. At One Vision CBO, understanding this problem in its full complexity is the starting point for everything we do through our Clean Water Access Initiative.
The Real Cost of an Unreliable Water Source
When a household doesn't have a reliable water point nearby, the cost isn't just measured in shillings paid to vendors, though that adds up fast for families already stretching a tight budget. It's measured in time — often two or three hours a day spent walking, queuing, and carrying jerricans, time that falls disproportionately on women and school-going girls. It's measured in missed classes, missed income-generating hours, and physical strain that accumulates over years of carrying 20-litre containers on foot.
It's also measured in health. Water drawn from unprotected sources, stored in uncovered containers, or transported over long distances in the heat is far more likely to carry contamination. Diarrhoeal disease, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses remain some of the most preventable — yet most common — causes of clinic visits among children under five in informal settlements across Nairobi, including parts of Kasarani.
What 'Access' Actually Means
When we talk about clean water access, we don't just mean water that is technically potable somewhere in the sub-location. We mean water that a household can reach in under 30 minutes round trip, water priced fairly enough that a family doesn't have to choose between drinking water and dinner, and water that is consistently available rather than rationed to a few hours every few days.
This is the standard the Clean Water Access Initiative is working toward — installing and rehabilitating community water points strategically placed so that no household in our target areas has to walk further than necessary, and pairing that infrastructure with basic water-safety education so families know how to store and handle water once they've collected it.
Why This Is a Community Project, Not Just an Infrastructure Project
Boreholes and water points break down. Pumps fail. Pipes get vandalized or simply wear out. A tap installed without a plan for who maintains it and who pays for repairs often stops working within a year or two — which is why our approach pairs every water point with a local water user committee, made up of residents who take ownership of upkeep, collect a small maintenance fee, and flag problems early.
This community-ownership model is slower to set up than simply drilling a borehole and walking away, but it's the difference between a water point that works for six months and one that works for a decade.
What Happens When a Water Point Fails
It's worth being honest about the fragile side of this picture too. Even where a water point exists, a single mechanical failure — a broken pump, a snapped pipe joint, a burnt-out solar controller — can instantly push dozens of households back into the old pattern of long walks and expensive vendor water, sometimes for weeks if repairs are delayed by cost or logistics. This fragility is exactly why access can't be measured only by counting how many water points exist on a map; it has to be measured by how reliably they actually function month after month, through both dry and rainy seasons.
A resident in Mwiki who has watched a nearby tap run dry more than once develops a reasonable scepticism toward any new water project, however well-intentioned. Rebuilding that trust after a failed or abandoned project takes far longer than building it fresh, which is one more reason our Clean Water Access Initiative treats long-term maintenance planning as inseparable from the initial installation, rather than as a separate concern to figure out later.
A Problem That Looks Different Street by Street
Even within Mwiki Sub-Location, water access isn't a single uniform problem. Some pockets are within a few minutes of a functioning tap; others, often the newer or more informally built sections, sit far enough from any reliable source that the burden is dramatically higher. Treating the whole sub-location as a single statistic would mean the streets with the worst access remain invisible in any average, which is exactly why our site selection process, described in more detail elsewhere on this site, insists on street-level mapping rather than sub-location-wide estimates.
This granular approach takes longer and is less convenient to communicate in a single summary figure, but it's the only way to make sure the households facing the longest walks and the highest vendor prices are the ones prioritised first, rather than whichever location happens to be logistically easiest to reach.
Clean water is one of those needs that's easy to take for granted until you don't have it. If you'd like to support the Clean Water Access Initiative — whether through a donation, technical expertise, or simply spreading the word — reach out to us at info@onevisioncbo.site or +254 798 200890. Every household with a working tap nearby is one less family carrying that daily burden.