Our Programs

The Safe Water Program is currently piloting and scaling dispensers in a wide range of contexts around the world.  Although dispensers have the potential to benefit as many as 1 billion people and save the lives of up to 150,000 children under the age of 5, SWP is first targeting countries where there is the highest potential impact on diarrheal disease, there is sufficient operational capacity for success, the population has proven acceptance to chlorine, and where resources are available for scaling.  In the past couple years, much of SWP’s focus has been testing and scaling dispensers in rural Kenya, but extensive pilots are underway in Haiti, Bangladesh, India, Swaziland, and Ethiopia.

Our work in Kenya

The Safe Water Program works to implement chlorine dispensers in the Western and Nyanza Provinces of Kenya in partnership with Kenyan government ministries.  Western and Nyanza provinces constitute 25 percent of Kenya’s population.

Ministry of Education: School-Based Dispenser Program

Kenya’s Ministry of Education has initiated a dispenser pilot in 33 rural primary schools that lack piped water.   The dispensers are installed at communal water sources near the schools while chlorine is delivered by IPA, and pupils carry the chlorine to their home water points.  This pilot is promising, and would promote a distribution system that uses educational institutions as a hub and spoke delivery mechanism to reach deep into rural communities.

The program currently provides safe water to over 24,000 students and 2,200 households.  The pilot is implemented and funded by the Ministry of Education’s National School Health and Nutrition Program.

“It is not sufficient to provide students with safe water at schools: students must have safe water at home as well to perform their best every day. For this reason, it makes sense to use the school as the hub from which chlorine can be distributed to the community. This program unites communities and schools around the common goal of safe water to improve child health, attendance, and test scores.”- District Education Officer, Busia District

Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation: Health Facility-Based Dispenser Initiative

Kenya’s Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation is implementing a chlorine dispenser pilot via health facilities in Western Kenya. Chlorine refills are distributed to water points through health clinics via community health workers, and health clinic staff and grassroots community health workers manage ongoing maintenance and promotion of chlorine usage.

“Child diarrhea is one of the most common illnesses seen by my health facility. Preventing diarrhea through chlorination at water sources will give my staff more time to focus on patients with other illnesses such as HIV and malaria.  It will also save money for the facility and the patients, since prevention is much cheaper than treatment." 

- Syphrine Waswa, Divisional Public Health Office, Matayos Health Centre

Local Governments

Two local governments, the Busia Municipal Council and the Lake Victoria North Water Services Board,  in Western Kenya voted to finance and implement dispenser pilot programs.  The programs have been very popular with communities: in a survey conducted by IPA,84% of the people surveyed said that the dispensers were one of the top three projects that the local government had implemented in their communities that year; and all survey respondents thought that dispensers are good use of public resources.