Clean water February 2026 St. Kizito Primary School, Mubende
The Day the Water Ran Clean
What changed at one Mubende school when safe drinking water finally arrived.
Sample content. School names, figures and stories on this page are illustrative while we confirm them with partner schools and obtain consent.
For years, the 400 children of St. Kizito Primary School drank from a rainwater tank that ran dry every dry season and a well that turned brown in the rains. Head teachers across Mubende will tell you the same thing: the weeks after the first big rains are when attendance drops, because waterborne illness moves through a classroom faster than a teacher can mark the register.
That pattern is exactly what our program was built to break. In 2021, St. Kizito became our first partner school. We installed a multi-stage purification system — sediment filtration and UV treatment — on site, trained the school caretaker to maintain it, and scheduled termly technician visits so the system never quietly fails.
The results did not arrive as a headline; they arrived as a register. Through the most recent wet season, St. Kizito held health-day attendance above 90% for the first time in the school’s recorded logs. The head teacher’s note in the termly report is characteristically plain: no stomach-illness cluster this term, and the tap at the compound has become part of the school day rather than an event.
Water is the least dramatic of our four programs and the most foundational. A child who is not sick is present; a child who is present can be dewormed, screened, and taught. Everything else in the model stands on that baseline — which is why the first thing we install is never the last thing we maintain.
Attendance held above 90% through the wet season — the school’s first such term on record.
Illustrative story. The school name and details are being confirmed with the school and its head teacher before publication.