Clean Water Project in Cambodia

The Cambodia Clean Water Project saves lives and helps protect livelihoods by giving rural communities access to clean drinking water. In Cambodia, 1 in 7 children dies before the age of five from preventable diseases such as typhoid, malnutrition, malaria, dengue fever, and diarrhea.

Dirty water is the common denominator for all of these conditions and the direct cause of many. Moreover, when adults fall victim to such illnesses and are unable to work, it is not long before entire families go without food, and the cost of medicines and treatment can leave a family struggling with debt for years.

Volunteers spend days building and installing bio-sand water filters at the project, which are a low-cost way to provide potable water to impoverished areas from any source (i.e. pump wells, pit wells, rivers, ponds). Sand filters are a relatively new technology in Cambodia and are highly effective as they are easy to construct with locally available materials as well as simple to install and maintain.