Impact
Clean water is not one outcome among several. It is the condition that makes the others possible.
Time & opportunity
Collecting water falls mainly to women and girls. Every hour spent walking to a water source and carrying it home is an hour not spent in a classroom, on a farm, or earning an income. A well close to home does not just change what a household drinks — it changes what its members can do with a day.
Documented in The Village Heart, pages 26.
Education
Where a school has no water supply, children are sent to fetch it, and attendance suffers — girls most of all. The Foundation documented schools where a well at the gate changed both the school day and who was present for it.
Documented in The Village Heart, pages 38–39.
Health & clinics
The Village Heart documented rural clinics operating without running water, drawing instead from unprotected holes in the ground — in buildings where minor operations were performed and women gave birth. Water is the precondition for hygiene, for maternal care, and for any clinical safety at all.
Documented in The Village Heart, pages 40–41.
Nutrition & agriculture
Relieving hunger begins with families able to grow their own crops, and that begins with water. A village well makes horticulture possible — first for the household, then as produce that can be sold. It is the mechanism behind the Foundation’s women’s farming groups.
Documented in The Village Heart, pages 42–46.
The Village Heart · 2016
These are the figures published in The Village Heart a decade ago. They are reproduced here as a historical record of what ARF was responding to at the time — not as current statistics. Present-day figures should be taken from WHO, the UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Programme, the World Bank or Tanzanian government sources.
1.1 billion
people denied the right to clean drinking water — 80% of them rural dwellers
2.4 billion
people without access to proper sanitation
46%
of Tanzanians without access to clean water supplies
38%
of Tanzanian schools without water supplies within school perimeters
40 billion hours
spent walking for water each year across Africa
Half
of the world’s hospital beds filled with people suffering water-related diseases
From the district's list of villages in need, to the day the community switches the pump on.