With many people contributing on the TPRF website or its Food for People Cause on Facebook, the Foundation’s initial World Water Day campaign goal of $25,000 was exceeded by almost three thousand, resulting in a grant of $28,000 to ensure clean water to hundreds of thousands of people in India.

TPRF’s World Water Day campaign offered matching funds to The Adventure Project’s (TAP) innovative program that will train mechanics to repair and maintain water wells in West Bengal and the District of Sheohar in the state of Bihar. This two-week campaign will train and equip 50 water-well mechanics, a significant contribution to TAPs goal of 186.

The persistent drought that has devastated the Horn of Africa for the past several years made it difficult for Zeinab Ahmed to feed her six children. Without rain, the crops failed. When the large shallow lakes where some communities watered their animals dried up, livestock, on which the herdsmen of the area depend for their livelihood, began dying off. Most of the men in the region had left in search of work or grazing lands elsewhere. If Zeinab could not find a way to water her goats, she would have no income.

Borehole pumps that once brought water up from deep reserves were broken or inoperable because villagers could no longer afford the fuel to run them. Soon, the cost of drinking water became prohibitive.

Zoliswa Nkcitha's world fell apart when her mother died. At 29, she became head of a family of five, none of them employed. She had no job skills, no identification papers. How was she to take care of them?

The Nkcithas — Zoliswa, her sisters Lulama, Nokuzola and Noxolo, and their brother Zanethemba — live in Cape Town's Mfuleni Township, a slum where Blacks were forcibly relocated during South Africa's apartheid government. Its 7,000 residents live in miserable, low-cost housing and makeshift shacks, sharing communal taps and toilets. There is no electricity. Life is a struggle for everyone. For Zoliswa and her siblings, all of whom are mentally challenged, that struggle was overwhelming.
Five years later, the family had grown to include five children between the ages of 8 months and four years. With no source of income, they lived in squalor, subsisting by begging for food on the streets. Some days there was nothing to eat. All of the children suffered from malnutrition and neglect.

In Rokhakiri, a small district in Cambodia's Battambang province, access to water is not a problem. The 25,000 residents share three communal ponds, a small lake and a well at the village school. This may sound ideal, but the water quality is actually very poor. Samples from all these sources failed purification tests commissioned by All Ears Cambodia (AEC), a nonprofit working in the area. TPRF's recent gift of US$6,800 will pay for three solar-powered water-purification systems that should have far-reaching effects on village life.

Tucked in the southeast corner of the province, Rokhakiri endured several decades of occupation by Khmer Rouge troops and has only recently been officially reintegrated into Cambodia. Most of the residents of this rural area were displaced from refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. They are very poor, with no access to healthcare and little understanding of basic hygiene.