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Mbago Ibanda
220 people
Project Completed
March 30, 2020
Mbago Ibanda, Uganda, Africa
- Story
- Plan
- FAQ's
Clean Water, New Life: Jessica’s Story
December 2020
One after another, Jessica’s dreams are coming within reach. Safe water, healthy children, and now a new home and business.
“My life has just begun at the age of forty,” she said. “If anyone had told me that life would become this much better after I had given birth to six children, I would have sworn that they were lying, and I cannot honestly contain the joy that I feel.”
“Life has taken on a completely new meaning for me,” she added.
Jessica, her husband, and their six children live in Mbago Ibanda village, a rural community in Uganda. For years, they relied on a pond for drinking water. They were sick and exhausted from long walks for water.
“One of the biggest improvements since we received safe water is that our productivity has gone up,” she said. “This has come with a significant increase in income that now allows us to save and invest.”
Jessica dreams of opening a poultry farm.
“This will help to increase my income and make it easier to invest in my children’s education,” she said.
With the new, safe water well and healthy habits, they’re no longer spending so much on medication.
“We plan to construct a new family home,” she said. “It is one of the things that we never thought possible before, but now very much so; I never knew that just getting safe water would change everything for us for the better.”
With safe water, hygiene, and sanitation practices, families are transformed. You can be a part of a transformation story. Sponsor a water project today, and follow along to see your impact.
Life in Mbago Ibanda: Stanley’s Story
Stanley Mukwano has 10 children in Mbago Ibanda village, a community in desperate need of safe, accessible water.
Right now, the well that Stanley and all of Mbago Ibanda village uses is extremely overcrowded. Community members sometimes wait in line for hours just to fill one container with water.
“Our well does not produce enough water,” Stanley said. “It breaks down always.”
It’s possible that the well was not constructed with quality materials or wasn’t drilled deep enough, resulting in the low water yield and faulty parts. It’s also likely that it never received the maintenance it needed over the years.
Stanley is a community leader. His name, “Mukwano,” means “friend,” and it perfectly describes his relationship with all in Mbago Ibanda village. Laughter erupts from whatever household he is visiting. He is a kind, affectionate father and husband.
Despite the long waits at the broken well, Stanley is grateful that they no longer have to travel to the pond.
“We used to use ceramic pots to fetch water, waking at 3 a.m. to make the four-hour journey over the mountain,” he said. “As a father of daughters, I was and still am always worried about them being attacked while gathering water.”
While they were drinking from the pond, they were sick all the time. In one instance, Stanely’s child developed cholera, a deadly waterborne disease, and he had no money to pay for treatment.
“I ended up staking my most prized item with a promise to redeem it after earning money,” he said.
When they received the well they have now, Stanley said, “It felt great; it felt beautiful.”
“Providing a community like this with water goes a long way in changing lives for the better,” he added.
Right now, the broken down well in Mbago Ibanda is causing children to miss school while waiting in line. It’s taking up valuable work hours and keeping everyone in poverty.
You can help Stanley’s family and others in Mbago Ibanda village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Sponsor Mbago Ibanda village today.
Mbago Ibanda 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 Mbago Ibanda:
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.
ODF
When each household builds and uses their own functioning restroom, a community earns an “Open Defecation Free” (ODF) certification. Each country has their own processes and celebration for ODF villages, and it’s a huge accomplishment towards improved health for everyone.
Water Committee Selected
Mbago Ibanda has selected water committee members to manage the safe village water source. Forming a water committee is a key step toward establishing a safe water source in a village. Committees are made up of local men and women who manage the well and collect fees, ensuring the community’s investment lasts for generations to come.
Construction Started
Work is officially underway to build a new water source for Mbago Ibanda village. Our local teams are using technology appropriate to the region and geography to ensure the new water source is sustainable.
Village Has Safe Water Source
The new safe water source is now complete!
Clean, safe water transforms a village. Everyone gathers to celebrate, thanking God for the miracle in their community.
Healthy Village
Great news! Mbago Ibanda 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 220 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.
“We are confident Lifewater’s work will have life-sustaining impact.”
– Cary A. Paine, The Stewardship Foundation
Story
Clean Water, New Life: Jessica’s Story
December 2020
One after another, Jessica’s dreams are coming within reach. Safe water, healthy children, and now a new home and business.
“My life has just begun at the age of forty,” she said. “If anyone had told me that life would become this much better after I had given birth to six children, I would have sworn that they were lying, and I cannot honestly contain the joy that I feel.”
“Life has taken on a completely new meaning for me,” she added.
Jessica, her husband, and their six children live in Mbago Ibanda village, a rural community in Uganda. For years, they relied on a pond for drinking water. They were sick and exhausted from long walks for water.
“One of the biggest improvements since we received safe water is that our productivity has gone up,” she said. “This has come with a significant increase in income that now allows us to save and invest.”
Jessica dreams of opening a poultry farm.
“This will help to increase my income and make it easier to invest in my children’s education,” she said.
With the new, safe water well and healthy habits, they’re no longer spending so much on medication.
“We plan to construct a new family home,” she said. “It is one of the things that we never thought possible before, but now very much so; I never knew that just getting safe water would change everything for us for the better.”
With safe water, hygiene, and sanitation practices, families are transformed. You can be a part of a transformation story. Sponsor a water project today, and follow along to see your impact.
Life in Mbago Ibanda: Stanley’s Story
Stanley Mukwano has 10 children in Mbago Ibanda village, a community in desperate need of safe, accessible water.
Right now, the well that Stanley and all of Mbago Ibanda village uses is extremely overcrowded. Community members sometimes wait in line for hours just to fill one container with water.
“Our well does not produce enough water,” Stanley said. “It breaks down always.”
It’s possible that the well was not constructed with quality materials or wasn’t drilled deep enough, resulting in the low water yield and faulty parts. It’s also likely that it never received the maintenance it needed over the years.
Stanley is a community leader. His name, “Mukwano,” means “friend,” and it perfectly describes his relationship with all in Mbago Ibanda village. Laughter erupts from whatever household he is visiting. He is a kind, affectionate father and husband.
Despite the long waits at the broken well, Stanley is grateful that they no longer have to travel to the pond.
“We used to use ceramic pots to fetch water, waking at 3 a.m. to make the four-hour journey over the mountain,” he said. “As a father of daughters, I was and still am always worried about them being attacked while gathering water.”
While they were drinking from the pond, they were sick all the time. In one instance, Stanely’s child developed cholera, a deadly waterborne disease, and he had no money to pay for treatment.
“I ended up staking my most prized item with a promise to redeem it after earning money,” he said.
When they received the well they have now, Stanley said, “It felt great; it felt beautiful.”
“Providing a community like this with water goes a long way in changing lives for the better,” he added.
Right now, the broken down well in Mbago Ibanda is causing children to miss school while waiting in line. It’s taking up valuable work hours and keeping everyone in poverty.
You can help Stanley’s family and others in Mbago Ibanda village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Sponsor Mbago Ibanda village today.
Plan
Mbago Ibanda 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 Mbago Ibanda:
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.
ODF
When each household builds and uses their own functioning restroom, a community earns an “Open Defecation Free” (ODF) certification. Each country has their own processes and celebration for ODF villages, and it’s a huge accomplishment towards improved health for everyone.
Water Committee Selected
Mbago Ibanda has selected water committee members to manage the safe village water source. Forming a water committee is a key step toward establishing a safe water source in a village. Committees are made up of local men and women who manage the well and collect fees, ensuring the community’s investment lasts for generations to come.
Construction Started
Work is officially underway to build a new water source for Mbago Ibanda village. Our local teams are using technology appropriate to the region and geography to ensure the new water source is sustainable.
Village Has Safe Water Source
The new safe water source is now complete!
Clean, safe water transforms a village. Everyone gathers to celebrate, thanking God for the miracle in their community.
Healthy Village
Great news! Mbago Ibanda 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 220 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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