The Close of Kenya RAPID, 650,226 People Have Received Improved Water Services

Two independent reviews of the recently concluded, five-year Millennium Water Alliance (https://mwawater.org/) program in Kenya have been released, confirming many achievements and offering recommendations for improvements in the future. Both studies found significant innovations and on the ground achievements throughout the program, which improved access to drinking water for more than 650,000 people, facilitated sanitation improvements for 81,097 people and supported more than 24,000 households to establish handwashing stations with soap.

The innovative, USD $30 million, 21-partner Kenya Resilient Arid Lands Partnership for Integrated Development (Kenya RAPID) ran from 2015 through 2020, was led by the Millennium Water Alliance (MWA) and was funded by the USAID (https://www.usaid.gov/), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/fdfa/organisation-fdfa/directorates-divisions/sdc.html), four implementing MWA members – CARE (https://www.care.org/), Catholic Relief Services (https://www.crs.org/), Food for the Hungry (https://www.fh.org/), and World Vision (https://www.wvi.org/) - and business partners.  Acacia Water and the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering (https://www.colorado.edu/center/mortenson/) provided specific technical roles across the entire program geography.

“… Kenya RAPID offered an ambitious set of activities aimed at supporting county governments to develop critical policy and related documents and overcome significant capacity gaps,” the evaluators for USAID wrote. “For health, livelihood, and conflict mitigation, Kenya RAPID sought to integrate thematic interventions in a more holistic and inclusive manner.”

Acacia Water is proud of being part of the Kenya RAPID family and to have supported Kenya-RAPID on the water resources management aspects of the program!

For more details, follow these links:

Summary of Findings and Recommendations (http://mwawater.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Kenya-RAPID-Summary-of-PE.pdf)

Kenya news (https://mwawater.org/programs/kenya-news/) (on the MWA website)