2024 Year End Giving Campaign - Join us!
Secure Hope and Prosperity in Central Africa
In developing countries where resources are scarce, your end-of-year support delivers direct, meaningful solutions to urban flooding and erosion issues at the community scale and improves lives with a reliable water source. Please support this important work of transforming rainwater into opportunity.
2024 STORIES
Mama Rose
“The public water well is 30 minutes by walking. It is not just us. There are other people, so you have to wait your turn. You have to wake up early in the morning to be the first to have water, otherwise you will wait. Now with the rain storage tank we have made serious progress. We can clean our clothes, especially when it rains, we have water regularly. We are not out of luck because I know that there is rain that will fall.“
Kelly & Pierre
“There was great difficulty to get water. We often took four containers of 25 liters. You already know that for the day today it will all be used. If you have more money, you will draw more water. If there is little money, there will be no possibility.
Now we have great joy at the advantage we have for this cistern. Since this happened, we are now in peace, and everyone who comes here expresses their joy. We now wash a full bucket and the clothes are well cleaned, the same for the plates. In any case, even in the toilets it is very clean, thanks to the water. Now we have the advantage.”
2025 PROJECTS
10,000 Clips
Our goal is to manufacture and ship 10,000 clips to Congo by the next rainy season. We are hoping to accomplish this for about $25,000.
Most roofs are of a quality that don’t accept a conventional gutter system. This is why we invented a clip that attaches directly to the roof edge, no matter how uneven it is. In April we conducted market research for our patented roof clip, which we feel will transform a family’s ability to collect rainwater in meaningful amounts.
For us, market research is essentially stopping anytime you see a local vendor selling gutters at a roadside stand. We designed the clip to match the typical gutter width of 12-cm (~5-in) they sell, so they could witness the applicability first hand.
After showing them how the clip rotates and adjusts for nearly any metal roof, you could see their eyes light up with interest. Then the negotiations began. The simple question of ‘What could you sell this for?” turned into a negotiation of what they would buy it for. That value varied from $2 in lower income neighborhoods to $5 downtown near the financial district. This was great news considering our estimate to manufacture these in Chicago is about $0.90. We have growing confidence that sale of these clips in the construction materials markets could be a small revenue stream to supplement our work in poor communities.
Kisenso Impact Assessment
In the world of social change, demonstrating impact is the name of the game. To have access to funding from large foundations and government aid organizations, we need to have a data-driven demonstration of our impact on the communities we serve. This includes physical impact to flooding, economic impact on household income opportunities, and social impact on the lived experience of the people we serve.
We have designed just such a project in the Kisenso neighborhood of Kinshasa where we will measure physical, economic and social change to approximately 100 families within a defined catchment area that already has a gully at the outlet.
We are currently collecting pre-project data. Rainfall is measured with a rain gage at a nearby convent. Each of these rainfall measurements is paired with a runoff measurement at the concrete measuring weir we constructed at the downstream extent of the catchment. Social and economic data are collected via interviews with local residents. Of particular interest to us are how much time, energy and money are invested each week to buy and transport water, and what opportunities and benefits may arise from an at-home water source.
We estimate that the complete project cost, including monitoring and reporting, will be approximately $200,000 and will last through the monsoon season of 2026.
