Dig Deep

We love ribbon-cutting ceremonies. We rarely celebrate the committee meeting that keeps the water flowing.

Over the last few weeks, our team has conducted refresher training with committees at six of Bomet County's oldest protected springs. The focus was on the long term: operations and maintenance, Water User Group governance, and income-generating activities to fund future repairs.

These are not just infrastructure projects. They are community institutions. The committee members who manage these springs know their neighbours, understand their landscape, and have a direct stake in keeping the water flowing.

That matters more each year. As rainfall becomes less predictable and pressure on land increases, the communities who know their springs best are the ones who will protect them. Not because a government agency or NGO told them to - but because their families depend on it.

However, community ownership alone is not enough. That is why we are continuing to build the capacity of the Bomet WASH Hub to monitor spring infrastructure and provide ongoing support - so that committees have the backup they need to sustain their work for the long term.

Thank you to the spring committees leading this work, and to all our supporters who help make it possible.

Coordination sounds boring.

A lack of it is also the reason so many development programmes fail or duplicate.

Across Bomet County, the WASH Hub - a government department Dig Deep helped establish - is changing that.

Every month the Hub brings together county departments, the local water utility, NGO partners including the Kenya Red Cross, World Vision and Aqua Clara, and Dig Deep. Together, we share progress, identify gaps and align our plans.

This year, the Hub rolled out a shared digital reporting platform. For the first time, every partner reports data in the same format, on the same system, every month.

Before this existed, NGOs would deliver projects without knowing what government was already planning. Government would plan without knowing what NGOs had already built.

Now, decision makers can see - in real time - what is happening across the county and where support is most needed.

Not just a meeting. A shared system that makes duplication harder and progress easier to sustain.

Thank you to all our partners and supporters who help make this work possible.

Clean water doesn't come from a pipe. It comes from a landscape that someone chose to protect.

Tomorrow is World Environment Day. In Bomet County, the springs, wetlands and catchment areas that supply clean water to thousands of families are under growing pressure from deforestation, encroachment and unsustainable land use. When those landscapes degrade, the water dries up.

To date, Dig Deep has worked with communities to protect 24 springs across Bomet County, providing reliable clean water to thousands of families. However, protecting a spring is not just about the infrastructure. Communities plant trees, restore wetland margins and take long-term stewardship of the water sources they depend on.

The someone in that story is them.

Thank you to the communities protecting their landscapes, and to all our supporters who help make this work possible.

For millions of girls, one biological fact determines whether they go to school this week. It shouldn't.

Today is World Menstrual Hygiene Day. In Bomet County, Kenya, the challenge of managing a period safely and with dignity is compounded - by schools not having private toilets, having limited access to clean water, and a persistent gap in information.

At Dig Deep, menstrual hygiene is central to our work in schools - not a footnote.

That is why our team are:
– Delivering hygiene and menstrual health education across all our partner schools
– Supporting government officers to monitor WASH facilities and keep them functioning
– Building school toilets that are genuinely private and safe for girls
– Training community health promoters to continue this work in homes and villages

Every girl deserves to be in school, learning – every single day of the month.

One question added to a routine school visit. That's how you keep 20,000 children's toilets working.

Over the last few months, Dig Deep has worked with Curriculum Support Officers across Sotik Sub-County to embed toilet monitoring into their routine school visits. These are Kenyan government education officials who already visit schools every term. From this month, they are using the digital mWater tool to report on school toilets in real time.

When schools know their toilets are part of the report, they become part of the priority. Maintenance happens. Handwashing stations stay functional. The shift is small, but it's powerful.

Not a one-off project, but a permanent reason for every school to keep its toilets clean.

If this pilot proves what we think it will, the plan is to roll it out across Bomet County - reaching every school student.

Sometimes the most important room in a school isn't the classroom. It's the one nobody wants to talk about.

When school toilets are safe, private and well maintained, girls stay in school during their periods. They stay throughout the day. They stay year after year.

When they are not - attendance drops, confidence dips, and the gap in girls' education widens.

Dig Deep works with our partners to design school toilets with this in mind: separate facilities for boys and girls, private and secure, with handwashing stations alongside. Alongside the infrastructure, we deliver sensitive, inclusive menstrual health education - helping to break down the taboos that too often leave girls without the information they need.

Safe toilets. Menstrual health education. Maintenance that lasts.

That's what keeping girls in school actually looks like. Thank you to everyone helping make it happen.

We build schools and call it progress. Then we wonder why girls stop showing up.

When a school lacks private, safe toilets - and when girls do not have access to information about managing their periods - the school day stops working for them.

It is not dramatic. It is not always visible. But it is consistent. Missed days. Discomfort. In some cases, girls who stop coming altogether.

Across Bomet County, girls are ambitious, committed and capable. The gap is in the environment around them - the facilities, education and information that should be a given, but too often are not.

This month, ahead of World Menstrual Hygiene Day on 28 May, we are sharing more about how Dig Deep works with our partners to close this gap - through school infrastructure, hygiene education, and training that helps communities sustain the change.

Because every girl deserves to stay in school, every single day of the month.

Most sanitation projects end at the ribbon cutting. The real work starts the day after.

Since 2022, every single household across 390 villages in Bomet County has been verified as having a toilet and a place to wash hands. That's a huge achievement - led by the communities themselves.
However, reaching that milestone is only half the story. Sustaining it is the other half.

So far this year, Dig Deep and the Bomet County Department of Health have trained 140 community health promoters to do exactly that - visit households, support families at risk of slipping back, and promote hygiene practices that last.

The training went beyond monitoring. Promoters also learned soap making - both as a hygiene tool and as an income-generating activity to sustain their work in the community long after the programme moves on.
Sustainability is not a buzzword. It is community health promoters making soap, visiting households, and helping families safeguard their own health.

Thank you to the communities leading this work, and to all our supporters who help make it possible.

At Jubilee Amani Primary School, learners from pre-school to Grade 7 spent a morning learning something that could save their lives.

Our team delivered a hygiene education session - using games, demonstrations and pictorials to teach children how to wash their hands properly, how to make a tippy tap at home, and how diseases spread through water and poor sanitation.

The children were fully engaged. The teachers were, too.

This is WASH in Schools in action. Not just taps and toilets - though those matter enormously - but the knowledge and habits that make a lasting difference to health.

Across Bomet County, we work in 60 schools, reaching over 20,000 children a year with safe sanitation and clean water. Alongside this, we deliver hygiene and menstrual health education to 33,000 children and their 124,000 family members.

Infrastructure without education is only half the job.

The best partnerships don't start with a contract. They start with years of shared work. This month, we signed a 5-year Memorandum of Understanding with the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) - one of Kenya's most trusted humanitarian organisations.

This isn't the start of our relationship. It's the formalisation of one that's been quietly delivering for communities across Bomet for years - and it will strengthen our joint work through the Bomet CountyWASH Hub.

At the signing, Dr. Ahmed Idris, Secretary General of the Kenya Red Cross Society, spoke about the global shift towards local partnerships - and noted that Dig Deep aligns with all three of KRCS's key partnership criteria:
-Specialised expertise
-Strong government relationships
-A community-centred approach

Huge thanks to the Kenya Red Cross Society team, the communities of Bomet who continue to shape this work, and the supporters who make it all possible.

This is another step towards our goal of ensuring that all one million people of Bomet County - half of whom are children - get access to clean water, safe sanitation, and good hygiene.