Clean water for 10,000+ students in 1 year of Sensiblue & TGUP partnership

One year ago this didn't exist. Today, 23 schools and more than 10,000 students in Uganda drink safe water every day because of it. Here's the full story of how we got there — including the parts that didn't go smoothly.

How it started: a conference, a donor, and a dropped Rwanda project

It began at ChangeNOW 2025 in Paris, where we met two people from Rwanda whose stories about the state of school water there stuck with us. We started looking for a donor to help us bring Sensiblue to schools in Africa, and that search led us to Tineke Jacobsen — a Dutch woman living in California who oversees a legacy fund dedicated to supporting people, and especially children, who need help the most.

The Rwanda project never got off the ground. But Tineke had worked before with The Global Uplift Project (TGUP), a California-based NGO, and introduced us. Two months later, we had our first school in Uganda up and running.

The pilot: Ssaku Secondary School

On 2 August 2025, we installed our first Sensiblue purifier at Ssaku Secondary School — 529 students who had previously been drinking untreated borehole water. The installation was carried out by our Ugandan partner, the Nsawo Community Development Project (NCDP), led by Sophia Deborah Luyiima Kulubya ("Deborah") and her team.

The pilot cost around US$1 550 — the price of doing something for the first time. When the water lab results came back strongly positive, Tineke decided to fund a full first phase.

Phase 1: six more schools by year-end 2025

Between September and mid-December 2025, six more installations followed:

That's 3 127 students with safe water on campus, at an average cost of roughly US$ 1 400 per school — already a big drop from the pilot, thanks to what we'd learned.

January–February 2026: a mid-course correction

At the start of 2026 we reviewed Phase 1 together with TGUP and NCDP, and decided two things: we'd start six-monthly water-lab retesting at every installed school, and — based on the results so far — TGUP would fund a second phase of 16 more schools from a mix of donors.

The six-month retest in February turned up a real problem: four schools weren't performing to standard. Not because the Sensiblue unit itself had failed, but because of installation-side issues — insufficient water pressure at some sites, pipe diameter and elevation problems at others, and clogging at the original pilot site at Ssaku. TGUP and NCDP funded the fixes, and every affected school was back to full performance afterward. We also used the findings to tighten our criteria for which schools we'd add going forward.

Phase 2: 16 more schools, April–July 2026

With funding for all 16 schools confirmed by March, installations ran from late April through early July 2026:

That's 7 000 more students, at an average cost that had come down further to roughly US$ 1 100 per school.

The numbers, all in

Across Phase 1 and Phase 2 combined:

• 23 schools, across the Luwero, Kampala, Mukono and Wakiso districts

• 10 127 students with direct access to safe drinking water, and 15,036 people benefiting in total once you count family and community members who also draw on school taps

• Water quality verified through testing at the Ndejje National University Water Research and Development Centre in Kampala: 100% reduction in E. coli and coliform bacteria, 99.9% reduction in viruses, and results within WHO limits for ammonia, nitrates and sulfates

• Ongoing maintenance running at US$84 per school per year, mostly pre-filter cartridge replacement — we're now moving to partly rinsable cartridges to bring that down further

• A new maintenance schedule where a plumber visits every installed school three times a year, timed just before each school term starts, so systems are always ready when students arrive

What's next: Phase 3

In June 2026 we decided to double the programme again: 27 more schools, bringing the total target to 50 schools and, on TGUP's estimate, WHO-standard water for more than 20 000 Ugandan children and community members once complete. Around 30% of Phase 3 funding is secured so far, and we're actively looking for more funding partners to get the rest of the way. First new installations are expected in October 2026, with the full Phase 3 rollout completing by December 2026.

TGUP set up a new ongoing program called "Clean Water for Africa" that's continuously going to bring these systems to countries they're operating in. Find all about it on their website and you can donate there as well. 

On cost: we're targeting under US$ 1 000 per school for Phase 3, and — if we can get to full-scale rollout across 1 000's of schools in Uganda — we think we can get it down to under US$ 700 per school on an installation and US$ 40 per school per year on maintenance. 

None of this happens without TGUP (Robert Freeman, Cathy Dwulet and team), NCDP (Deborah and team), and Tineke Jacobsen's continued backing. If you'd like to help fund Phase 3, or explore a similar programme elsewhere, please reach out to our team. On the contact page.