BEHIND THE ENGINEERING // KENYA
Students Bring Water Access to Rural Kenya
Building upon a multi-year effort, engineering students provided year-round clean water supply to a community in need.
Written by Claudia Hoffacker
ROY GICHURU WAS BORN AND RAISED in Kenya and knows what it’s like to have limited resources. His community had no electricity until he was about 10 years old and the people struggled to access clean water.
“They still have problems getting water where I grew up in Central Kenya,” Gichuru said.
Now, as an engineering student at Virginia Tech, Gichuru is helping a community back home get the clean water it so desperately needs.
Gichuru is one of 15 members of Virginia Tech’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA) working on this Kenya water project. Seven students traveled last summer to the rural community of Masara Steel to help install a borehole well and hand pump designed to provide year-round access to clean groundwater.
These Virginia Tech engineering students traveled to Kenya to help install a new borehole well and hand pump. (Back row, from left): Koral Hatipkarasulu, Roy Gichuru, Robert Rooney, and Colin Drumm. (Front row, from left): Sai Chegu, Ansley Bearden, and Angel Ochieng. Photo: Roy Gichuru
The struggle
Located in Migori County in western Kenya, Masara Steel has limited access to clean water, especially during the dry season. Community members—mostly women and children—walk long distances multiple times a day to collect water and carry it home in heavy buckets.
During the rainy months, the community of 1,700 gets water from rainwater catchment tanks and the River Munyu, which runs through the center of the community, explained Ansley Bearden, a senior engineering student at Virginia Tech and president of its EWB chapter. Both sources are often contaminated and quickly dry up once the rains stop.
“Without a clean and reliable water source through the year, the community faces challenges such as waterborne illnesses, skin irritation, and time-consuming days spent searching for water,” Bearden said.
Masara Steel residents and Virginia Tech students gather around as one resident pumps water out of the new borehole well. Photo: Roy Gichuru
A long-term project
Virginia Tech’s EWB chapter first began working to change this situation for Masara Steel in 2019. The project was stalled by the pandemic in 2020, but students still managed to work remotely to get one borehole well and hand pump installed in 2022. When they were finally able to raise enough funds to travel to Kenya in 2025, students spent about two weeks working with a professor, a contractor, and community members to install another well and hand pump.
“Although our in-country contact, Paul Olang’o, provided excellent on-the-ground feedback, seeing the site firsthand offered a completely different level of context for making design decisions,” Bearden said. “Our team conducted extensive research and held many virtual meetings with community members, but experiencing the environment in person and speaking face-to-face provided a new perspective that will be invaluable to our work going forward.”
Making the second well a reality
One of the first steps for the latest project was figuring out the best placement for the second well, said Chris Lombardo, a Harvard engineering professor, who served as a mentor and the “responsible engineer in charge” for the project.
“We hired a local hydrogeologist to perform a hydrogeologic study on multiple potential well sites within the community,” said Lombardo, who first joined EWB in 2004 and has been a mentor for several student projects in Kenya. “Using this data, as well as community preferences, population surveys, etc., our team selected a location for the borehole well to be drilled.”
Next, the team chose to contract with Hydrating Humanity, an organization that has partnered with EWB-USA on many projects in Migori County. “While our team did not do the physical installation, we supervised the drillers and ensured that the work done was of a good quality,” Lombardo said. “This role would be very similar to an engineer representing a client’s interests here in the U.S.”
Drilling and installation
The contractors used a rotary drill rig with hydraulics to break through the mud and rock to drill the borehole well, which is 197 meters deep, Gichuru said. They drove 49 hollow steel rods into the ground and pumped compressed air into the rods to push down a foam-and-water mixture to break up the mud.
Outer casings were installed into the borehole to provide a boundary against contaminants and create a wall to prevent the borehole from collapsing. The compressed air also passed through these casings. The total drilling process took six days.
After drilling, the contractor removed the steel rods and installed inner casings with open slots. Next, a gravel pack was installed between the inner and outer casings to act as a filter for the water entering the borehole from the aquifer. Then the drill rig was removed and the borehole was flushed clean, capped, and sealed. Crews then installed an Afridev hand pump and constructed a concrete pad featuring a channel that allows spilled water to flow away from the well head.
Masara Steel residents check out the newly constructed borehole well and hand pump. Photo: Roy Gichuru
Plans for an improved water system
Now that the community has two borehole wells, residents have access to a reliable source of clean water year-round, even during the dry season. However, because the town is very spread out geographically, many still have to walk long distances to get the water. Plus, pumping the water is hard manual labor.
“After a minute of pumping, I was exhausted,” Bearden said. “Women in the community do that day after day, then carry heavy containers for miles.”
That’s why the group plans to continue improving water access in the community. They hope to install two more borehole wells with hand pumps over the next two years. The long-term goal is to create a solar-powered kiosk system with pipes and faucets, providing all residents with easy access to water close to home.
With the kiosk system they envision, “community members would just turn a knob on a faucet, and it would fill up their water bucket, rather than having to manually handpump the water at the borehole site,” Bearden said. “And ideally there would be multiple faucets, so multiple people can fill up their water buckets at the same time.”
Gichuru agreed that it’s important to improve the distribution system. “The majority of community members fetching water are women and children. Women who are old or pregnant, and kids going before and after school or even during school to fetch water,” he said. “They have to walk long distances, sometimes after dark and, for some girls, that’s a security risk. That’s why an automated system was a very big discussion we had with women in the community.”
Both Gichuru and Bearden said they look forward to returning to Masara Steel at least one more time.
“This project means a lot to me,” Gichuru said. “I wanted to use my engineering skills to set up infrastructures that really help people and are sustainable. So, this project was really impactful because we’re setting up structures that will continue functioning and giving people water for the next generation and even the generation after that.”
Claudia Hoffacker, is an independent writer in Minneapolis.
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