About Lifewater Canada – Enabling you to provide life-saving water in Africa or Haiti

Lifewater Canada is a non-profit organization through which donors like you can provide safe and accessible drinking water to people who desperately need it in Africa and Haiti. You can drill wells, repair or replace hand-powered pumps, install water harvesting and storage systems, build community toilets, and provide health & hygiene training.

Donors like you have enabled Lifewater Canada to complete more than 17,800 projects that are benefiting more than 8.3 million children and adults, as of the end of our latest fiscal year on June 30, 2024.

Lifewater carefully positions its teams in regions where the need for wells and other water projects is most acute. This strategic positioning minimizes travel costs and response times. That becomes crucial when hurricanes or outbreaks of cholera and typhoid strike – enabling us to quickly mobilize and offer helping hands.

Because Lifewater relies heavily on volunteers and a small team of part-time contractors who work from their own homes, we keep our administrative and fundraising costs to less than 10% -- meaning at least 90 cents of every dollar you donate is used to provide people with safe, accessible water.

This very cost-effective method of providing safe drinking water and sanitation has attracted the approval of Charity Intelligence, an independent organization that monitors the performance of more than 850 non-profit organizations in Canada. Charity Intelligence has included Lifewater in its list of the 10 most impactful charities in Canada, or those organizations achieving the most with what donors invest in them, for SIX years in a row including 2024. 

Charity Intelligence has also repeatedly given Lifewater an elite five-star rating and called it the best water-focused charity in Canada.

When Africans or Haitians don’t have access to a nearby well, they must either:

• Rely on the nearest pond, lake, creek, or river – which is often contaminated because it's also where animals defecate or people bathe and wash their clothes. When people drink this dirty water, they contract diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery. The World Health Organization (WHO) says someone – usually a child – is dying every 30 seconds in the developing world from diarrheal diseases caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. When children or adults survive while being forced to drink contaminated water, diarrheal diseases still cause many to miss school or work -- and struggle to escape poverty.
• Walk long distances, sometimes hours at a time, to the nearest well. The time that adults spend walking is time they cannot invest in caring for their children or earning income for their families. The time that children spend walking is time they cannot invest in going to school, working on their homework, or simply enjoying being a child. Walking long distances to the nearest well, often in very isolated environments and sometimes at night, also leaves women and children especially vulnerable to predators.

Here are some of the ways you can have a life-saving impact:

Give once:

• Every $50 you donate will provide a year of safe and accessible water to almost 50 people.
• Share some of the average $5,500 cost of drilling a new well in Africa or Haiti.
• Rehabilitate an existing well, including replacing a broken hand pump and the concrete pump pad, for an average $1,500.
• Repair a broken hand pump for only $125 so a well is providing safe water again.
• Safe water has no value if people mistakenly contaminate it through unsafe health and hygiene practices. Your $100 donation will pay for a potentially life-saving Health & Hygiene community workshop.

Give monthly:

• Every month in which you donate $10 will provide a year of safe and accessible water to 10 more people who desperately need it.
• Your monthly donation of $125 will repair a broken handpump on a well -- and restore the flow of safe, accessible water to several hundred people -- every month!

What People Are Saying

"We wish to thank the real heroes – the workers and staff at Lifewater. Your time, effort, expertise, and prayers are to be saluted. Your joyful day-to-day service inspires and is a model to those of us who have so much. You link our gifts of money and convert it into life-saving water."

— A Canadian donor wishing to remain anonymous