Clean Water For All

Kibera Community Meeting

We’ve had a few exciting developments over the last couple of weeks.  First, we had a very interesting community meeting last week.  The meeting was attended by water vendors, village elders, and religious leaders.  It was kicked off by the Chief.  Overall I’d say the meeting went fairly well.  Most of the water vendors and community leaders were very supportive and excited about our coming to Kibera.  We did have a couple of people who considered themselves “water experts” and made some pretty crazy claims about the effectiveness of chlorine.  This is not surprising, as we’ve heard some pretty outrageous misconceptions as we conducted our research over the last few months.  Now we just know where these rumors come from.  I was also pleased with the strength of our management team, Steve and Freddy, who organized and ran the majority of the event. 

Steve presenting at the Kibera community meeting

On the registration front, we’ve submitted the paperwork to become an official Kenyan organization and are just a day or two away from registering with the IRS to become an official US Non-Profit.  Once our IRS paperwork is submitted, we’ll be able to accept tax-deductable donations.

Kibera community meeting

We’ve also made some great progress on the last milestone of funding.   We have three different organizations that have expressed interest in funding part or all of our pilot.  I don’t want to go into details until we’ve received a firm commitment, but needless to say I’m very excited about the progress in this area.

I look forward to providing hopefully positive updates in the near future, and I’m optimistic that we can still hit our goal of launching the pilot by the end of January.  Kenya pretty much shuts down for the holidays for about 3 weeks starting next week, but hopefully we can keep our momentum and start off strong in the new year.