

Namiro Biri
499 people
Project Completed
July 31, 2020
“It’s a miracle from God!” - Nekesa
Namiro Biri, Uganda, Africa
- Story
- Plan
- FAQ's
Namiro Biri village received safe water on July 31, 2020.
“Medicating water-related diseases took all our income leading to poverty as a way of life,” Nekesa, a mother of ten and farmer, said. “There is no way I would have foreseen where we are now with safe water; it’s a miracle from God!”
“I often felt crushed and depressed living through the difficulty of walking for miles for unsafe water yet still unable to bathe because it was not enough,” she added. “I’m so happy now for having safe water.”
With safe water, sanitation, and hygiene practices, families are transformed. When villages like Namiro Biri receive safe water, children can go to school healthy, mothers and fathers can go to work, and everyone can thrive as God intends.
You can be a part of a transformation story. Sponsor a water project today, and follow along to see your impact.
Life in Namiro Biri: Mary’s Story
Mary remembers telling her 16-year-old, Janet, that she would not be able to take her final exams. The family couldn’t afford it. The experience motivated the mother of 10 to work even harder for her children.
“We spend too much on hospital bills because of using unsafe water,” Mary said. “If we got a well here, maybe we would be able to save money and send my daughter back to school.”
Mary lives in Namiro Biri village with her husband, Steven, and their 10 children. Steven owns and operates a small retail store, and Mary works at a motel nearby. In Uganda, students must take national exams to transfer from primary to secondary school, and secondary to university.
But, for children in Namiro Biri village, education is a great challenge. Families like Mary’s depend on a pond for water, making four trips a day for water that makes them sick.
Paying for medical treatment is costing them much of their income.
Things get even worse when the rains cease and the pond dries up. Since there is no alternative source, Mary’s family often draws from the small amount of stagnant water.
Janet dreams of going back to school and becoming a doctor.
“I was very sad when I could not register for my final exams,” Janet said. “My dream was to be a doctor and help others.”
Having a clean source of water nearby would change more than the family’s health.
“With water nearby I would make bricks to sell to increase our income,” Mary said. “Having clean water nearby would also help us maintain better hygiene to keep sickness away.”
Mary hopes to send Janet back to school. She hopes to never have to tell one of her children or grandchildren that they cannot become what they dream.
“Getting a well here would lift a great burden off our shoulders,” Mary said.
You can help Mary’s family and others in Namiro Biri village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Sponsor Namiro Biri village today.
Namiro Biri 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 Namiro Biri:

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! Namiro Biri 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 499 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
Namiro Biri village received safe water on July 31, 2020.
“Medicating water-related diseases took all our income leading to poverty as a way of life,” Nekesa, a mother of ten and farmer, said. “There is no way I would have foreseen where we are now with safe water; it’s a miracle from God!”
“I often felt crushed and depressed living through the difficulty of walking for miles for unsafe water yet still unable to bathe because it was not enough,” she added. “I’m so happy now for having safe water.”
With safe water, sanitation, and hygiene practices, families are transformed. When villages like Namiro Biri receive safe water, children can go to school healthy, mothers and fathers can go to work, and everyone can thrive as God intends.
You can be a part of a transformation story. Sponsor a water project today, and follow along to see your impact.
Life in Namiro Biri: Mary’s Story
Mary remembers telling her 16-year-old, Janet, that she would not be able to take her final exams. The family couldn’t afford it. The experience motivated the mother of 10 to work even harder for her children.
“We spend too much on hospital bills because of using unsafe water,” Mary said. “If we got a well here, maybe we would be able to save money and send my daughter back to school.”
Mary lives in Namiro Biri village with her husband, Steven, and their 10 children. Steven owns and operates a small retail store, and Mary works at a motel nearby. In Uganda, students must take national exams to transfer from primary to secondary school, and secondary to university.
But, for children in Namiro Biri village, education is a great challenge. Families like Mary’s depend on a pond for water, making four trips a day for water that makes them sick.
Paying for medical treatment is costing them much of their income.
Things get even worse when the rains cease and the pond dries up. Since there is no alternative source, Mary’s family often draws from the small amount of stagnant water.
Janet dreams of going back to school and becoming a doctor.
“I was very sad when I could not register for my final exams,” Janet said. “My dream was to be a doctor and help others.”
Having a clean source of water nearby would change more than the family’s health.
“With water nearby I would make bricks to sell to increase our income,” Mary said. “Having clean water nearby would also help us maintain better hygiene to keep sickness away.”
Mary hopes to send Janet back to school. She hopes to never have to tell one of her children or grandchildren that they cannot become what they dream.
“Getting a well here would lift a great burden off our shoulders,” Mary said.
You can help Mary’s family and others in Namiro Biri village today. Your gift will provide health training for each household, plus a new, safe water source near their village.
Sponsor Namiro Biri village today.
Plan
Namiro Biri 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 Namiro Biri:

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! Namiro Biri 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 499 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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