

Bulangira Mbili
363 people
Get This Project Started
$500 Raised of $18,150
1 supporter, 3% sponsored
“It is a desperate situation we are in.” - Elizabeth, mother of five
Bulangira Mbili, Uganda, Africa
- Story
- Plan
- FAQ's
Life in Bulangira Mbili: Elizabeth’s Story
Every morning before the sun rises, Elizabeth wakes. Her children lay asleep on their mats, and she is quiet as she takes her plastic container and begins gathering water for the day.
At the local well, the crowding begins early and carries into the night. To fill her container three times—the basic amount of water needed to drink, cook, and wash—Elizabeth spends three hours at the well.
And when the well breaks, gathering funds from the community to fix it can take months, and women and children walk for six hours to reach a well in another village.
“The congestion at the well is terrible,” she said. “People fight and get hurt, and if you are not strong and resilient, you walk even longer distances to find alternative water sources.”
“It is a desperate situation we are in,” she added.
Elizabeth and her husband have five children in Bulangira Mbili village. They have a small farm and sometimes, when they can’t get enough water, there is not enough food for everyone.
Elizabeth is determined to keep her children in school, a difficult endeavor when access to water often takes priority over education.
“I would love for my daughter to stay in school and become an engineer or a doctor,” she said. “I do not send her to help me get water because I fear that she will lose school time and fail to achieve her dreams.”
Their eldest child, Marion is in sixth grade. She loves to study science.
“With an improved water situation, I hope to use my time to start rearing chickens and pigs to supplement our family income, especially to support the children’s education,” Elizabeth said.
“Our lives would be much better if we had safe water nearer to us,” Elizabeth added. “I would use the time I spend waiting in the long lines to do other productive things.”
The well in Bulangira Mbili village isn’t enough for the community, and water scarcity is damaging the health and future of the children.
You can help Elizabeth’s family and others in Bulangira Mbili village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Lasting change means more than just building a well. Compelled by the love of Christ, local Lifewater staff work house by house to teach families healthy habits that will impact generations to come.
Here’s what happens when you sponsor a village water project through Lifewater:
Partner with a village. Your gift kickstarts a community water project.
Teach healthy habits. Small changes make a big impact on family health.
Build a well. The village contributes up to 15% for construction.
Measure impact. Local staff track success and provide support.
Engage the church. We equip local churches to love their community.
Sponsor Bulangira Mbili village today.
Bulangira Mbili is in a very remote region of Uganda
View Interactive Map
This village is on its way to becoming a Healthy Village. The process takes approximately 24 months from start to finish. You can follow along with the progress below.
Here’s the Plan for Bulangira Mbili:

Project Ready
Villages are carefully selected by Lifewater staff and wait for program work to begin in their area.
CLTS
In Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), each village goes through exercises that reveal how their current practices are making them sick, such as identifying all the places where feces are contaminating their environment. This important step equips communities to be knowledgeable about their health and willing to make changes.


Healthy Homes Registered
A home is certified healthy when a family has adopted five healthy habits: washing hands with soap and water, storing and using water safely, building and using a bathroom with a roof and door, using a drying rack to keep dishes off the ground, and keeping the area around the home safe and clean.
Healthy Village
Great news! Bulangira Mbili is now a certified Healthy Village. That means the safe water source is complete and more than 90% of the community’s homes are healthy. That is a new future for 363 children and families.

Water Project FAQs
When you sponsor a water project, you are helping bring lasting change. Your gift provides:
- House-to-house hygiene and sanitation education
- Custom engineered water source
- Construction of a safe water source
- Community engagement by Lifewater field staff to ensure change lasts
Lifewater also provides:
- Monitoring and evaluation of the project with real-time updates to donors
- Local church partnerships that equip the church to be the hands and feet of Jesus
- Five-year water source maintenance and sustainability (funded by beneficiary communities on a volunteer basis)
Yes! The village you are helping is a real village. All families photographed or shared from the project page have given their permission to have their information shared with you.
Lifewater has local staff that live and serve among the communities and schools where Lifewater works. Our staff know the language and the culture and are best equipped to serve communities. Because we seek to ensure sustainable water projects and community buy in, we do not allow donors to visit the projects they sponsor. However, we do commit to sending real-time updates, photos, and stories from the projects themselves.
With more than 40 years’ experience, LIfewater is the longest-running Christian clean water charity in North America. Over those 40 years, Lifewater has worked in more than 45 different countries. Currently, our work is focused in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia).
Lifewater identifies countries and regions that are unreached and underserved with basic water access and sanitation, which means we focus on areas where other organizations are not serving.
Although great strides have been made in the past 20 years to solve the global water crisis, remote and rural populations still remain unreached with adequate water and sanitation. These distant regions are difficult and often costly for governments and NGOs to serve well. Many of these communities feel as though they have been forgotten.
Currently, Lifewater has programs in Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Cambodia. You can go to lifewater.org/projects to select a specific water project to help. Because our programs are regionalized and made in partnership with the local governments, we are not able to take requests for specific water projects outside of our existing programs.
Lifewater budgets 80% of expenditures for programs. The remaining 20% is split between administrative/management and fundraising expenses. This ratio is best in class for nonprofits and is why Lifewater has received the highest rating from Charity Navigator.
Administrative/management expenses are used to ensure that we are effective in managing the funds entrusted to us and include the following types of expenses: accounting personnel, leadership time, professional development of staff, external auditors, legal counsel, government registration expenses in every U.S. state, credit card fees for processing donations, bank fees, database maintenance, and office expenses.
Fundraising expenses generate the income needed to do the work that we set out to do. These include the cost of direct mail appeals and communication, marketing projects, donor relations personnel, and email communication systems. Last year, every dollar invested into Lifewater fundraising efforts resulted in $10 of donation for the organization.
Over our 40 year history, Lifewater has received the highest accreditations from the most respected rating organization in the industry. Lifewater is recognized as one of the top-rated charities in the United States by independent reporting organizations, including:
- Charity Navigator (four stars)
- Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA)
- Guidestar (Platinum)
- Great Nonprofits (five star)
- Excellence in Giving
Learn more at https://lifewater.org/top-rated-charity.
Lifewater’s work is founded on the belief that every person is made in the image of God. It is with this conviction that we seek out the globe’s most unreached, marginalized people groups in need of safe water.
Both nationally and internationally, 100 percent of our staff are Christians. These Christian staff help facilitate Lifewater’s Healthy Church strategy in communities. And, where there are no churches, we work with church planting partners to start new churches.
To create Healthy Churches, Lifewater first trains church leaders in foundational theology. These leaders are equipped with the basic story of the Christian faith and the biblical mandate to love others. Leaders learn that stopping the spread of disease and caring for the vulnerable aligns with our responsibility as Christians to love our neighbor.
Second, Lifewater ensures churches have safe bathrooms on their premises, handwashing stations, clean water nearby, and the education to promote health within their congregations. It’s imperative that churches are early adopters of healthy hygiene practices.
Third, Lifewater encourages churches to help vulnerable households become Healthy Homes. Church leaders undergo a training to become WASH (water access, sanitation, and hygiene) advocates in their communities. These advocates are encouraged to identify widows, child-headed households, the elderly, and the disabled to help them meet the health standards of Lifewater’s programs.
Lifewater’s Vision of a Healthy Village strategy is a relationship-first method. This model transforms entire regions house by house, village by village, and school by school. It is among the most intensive household-level work happening in the entire developing world and is closely tracked for progress, sustainability, and overall impact.
We construct custom-engineered safe water sources and teach life-saving health and sanitation practices in local villages and schools in need.
Story
Life in Bulangira Mbili: Elizabeth’s Story
Every morning before the sun rises, Elizabeth wakes. Her children lay asleep on their mats, and she is quiet as she takes her plastic container and begins gathering water for the day.
At the local well, the crowding begins early and carries into the night. To fill her container three times—the basic amount of water needed to drink, cook, and wash—Elizabeth spends three hours at the well.
And when the well breaks, gathering funds from the community to fix it can take months, and women and children walk for six hours to reach a well in another village.
“The congestion at the well is terrible,” she said. “People fight and get hurt, and if you are not strong and resilient, you walk even longer distances to find alternative water sources.”
“It is a desperate situation we are in,” she added.
Elizabeth and her husband have five children in Bulangira Mbili village. They have a small farm and sometimes, when they can’t get enough water, there is not enough food for everyone.
Elizabeth is determined to keep her children in school, a difficult endeavor when access to water often takes priority over education.
“I would love for my daughter to stay in school and become an engineer or a doctor,” she said. “I do not send her to help me get water because I fear that she will lose school time and fail to achieve her dreams.”
Their eldest child, Marion is in sixth grade. She loves to study science.
“With an improved water situation, I hope to use my time to start rearing chickens and pigs to supplement our family income, especially to support the children’s education,” Elizabeth said.
“Our lives would be much better if we had safe water nearer to us,” Elizabeth added. “I would use the time I spend waiting in the long lines to do other productive things.”
The well in Bulangira Mbili village isn’t enough for the community, and water scarcity is damaging the health and future of the children.
You can help Elizabeth’s family and others in Bulangira Mbili village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Lasting change means more than just building a well. Compelled by the love of Christ, local Lifewater staff work house by house to teach families healthy habits that will impact generations to come.
Here’s what happens when you sponsor a village water project through Lifewater:
Partner with a village. Your gift kickstarts a community water project.
Teach healthy habits. Small changes make a big impact on family health.
Build a well. The village contributes up to 15% for construction.
Measure impact. Local staff track success and provide support.
Engage the church. We equip local churches to love their community.
Sponsor Bulangira Mbili village today.
Plan
Bulangira Mbili is in a very remote region of Uganda
View Interactive Map
This village is on its way to becoming a Healthy Village. The process takes approximately 24 months from start to finish. You can follow along with the progress below.
Here’s the Plan for Bulangira Mbili:

Project Ready
Villages are carefully selected by Lifewater staff and wait for program work to begin in their area.
CLTS
In Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), each village goes through exercises that reveal how their current practices are making them sick, such as identifying all the places where feces are contaminating their environment. This important step equips communities to be knowledgeable about their health and willing to make changes.


Healthy Homes Registered
A home is certified healthy when a family has adopted five healthy habits: washing hands with soap and water, storing and using water safely, building and using a bathroom with a roof and door, using a drying rack to keep dishes off the ground, and keeping the area around the home safe and clean.
Healthy Village
Great news! Bulangira Mbili is now a certified Healthy Village. That means the safe water source is complete and more than 90% of the community’s homes are healthy. That is a new future for 363 children and families.

FAQ's
Water Project FAQs
When you sponsor a water project, you are helping bring lasting change. Your gift provides:
- House-to-house hygiene and sanitation education
- Custom engineered water source
- Construction of a safe water source
- Community engagement by Lifewater field staff to ensure change lasts
Lifewater also provides:
- Monitoring and evaluation of the project with real-time updates to donors
- Local church partnerships that equip the church to be the hands and feet of Jesus
- Five-year water source maintenance and sustainability (funded by beneficiary communities on a volunteer basis)
Yes! The village you are helping is a real village. All families photographed or shared from the project page have given their permission to have their information shared with you.
Lifewater has local staff that live and serve among the communities and schools where Lifewater works. Our staff know the language and the culture and are best equipped to serve communities. Because we seek to ensure sustainable water projects and community buy in, we do not allow donors to visit the projects they sponsor. However, we do commit to sending real-time updates, photos, and stories from the projects themselves.
With more than 40 years’ experience, LIfewater is the longest-running Christian clean water charity in North America. Over those 40 years, Lifewater has worked in more than 45 different countries. Currently, our work is focused in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Uganda, and Tanzania) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia).
Lifewater identifies countries and regions that are unreached and underserved with basic water access and sanitation, which means we focus on areas where other organizations are not serving.
Although great strides have been made in the past 20 years to solve the global water crisis, remote and rural populations still remain unreached with adequate water and sanitation. These distant regions are difficult and often costly for governments and NGOs to serve well. Many of these communities feel as though they have been forgotten.
Currently, Lifewater has programs in Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Cambodia. You can go to lifewater.org/projects to select a specific water project to help. Because our programs are regionalized and made in partnership with the local governments, we are not able to take requests for specific water projects outside of our existing programs.
Lifewater budgets 80% of expenditures for programs. The remaining 20% is split between administrative/management and fundraising expenses. This ratio is best in class for nonprofits and is why Lifewater has received the highest rating from Charity Navigator.
Administrative/management expenses are used to ensure that we are effective in managing the funds entrusted to us and include the following types of expenses: accounting personnel, leadership time, professional development of staff, external auditors, legal counsel, government registration expenses in every U.S. state, credit card fees for processing donations, bank fees, database maintenance, and office expenses.
Fundraising expenses generate the income needed to do the work that we set out to do. These include the cost of direct mail appeals and communication, marketing projects, donor relations personnel, and email communication systems. Last year, every dollar invested into Lifewater fundraising efforts resulted in $10 of donation for the organization.
Over our 40 year history, Lifewater has received the highest accreditations from the most respected rating organization in the industry. Lifewater is recognized as one of the top-rated charities in the United States by independent reporting organizations, including:
- Charity Navigator (four stars)
- Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA)
- Guidestar (Platinum)
- Great Nonprofits (five star)
- Excellence in Giving
Learn more at https://lifewater.org/top-rated-charity.
Lifewater’s work is founded on the belief that every person is made in the image of God. It is with this conviction that we seek out the globe’s most unreached, marginalized people groups in need of safe water.
Both nationally and internationally, 100 percent of our staff are Christians. These Christian staff help facilitate Lifewater’s Healthy Church strategy in communities. And, where there are no churches, we work with church planting partners to start new churches.
To create Healthy Churches, Lifewater first trains church leaders in foundational theology. These leaders are equipped with the basic story of the Christian faith and the biblical mandate to love others. Leaders learn that stopping the spread of disease and caring for the vulnerable aligns with our responsibility as Christians to love our neighbor.
Second, Lifewater ensures churches have safe bathrooms on their premises, handwashing stations, clean water nearby, and the education to promote health within their congregations. It’s imperative that churches are early adopters of healthy hygiene practices.
Third, Lifewater encourages churches to help vulnerable households become Healthy Homes. Church leaders undergo a training to become WASH (water access, sanitation, and hygiene) advocates in their communities. These advocates are encouraged to identify widows, child-headed households, the elderly, and the disabled to help them meet the health standards of Lifewater’s programs.
Lifewater’s Vision of a Healthy Village strategy is a relationship-first method. This model transforms entire regions house by house, village by village, and school by school. It is among the most intensive household-level work happening in the entire developing world and is closely tracked for progress, sustainability, and overall impact.
We construct custom-engineered safe water sources and teach life-saving health and sanitation practices in local villages and schools in need.
Your gift reflects your trust in Lifewater International. We commit to honor your generosity by using your gift to help further the mission and vision of Lifewater International. Your donation is used by Lifewater International according to the project objectives to provide safe drinking water and improved sanitation and hygiene within the specified program area. Lifewater International is a charitable organization as described in 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, registered in the United States. All donations are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law.
Donations are non-refundable. Lifewater International will honor a donor’s request for any pre-approved program or project whenever possible. In rare occasions where this is not possible, gifts will be used where needed, in accordance with the organization’s charitable purpose. In accordance with this policy, donor’s explicitly release Lifewater International from further restriction on such funds.
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