Live campaign
Safe water, filtered through our own biochar
Waterborne disease, including cholera, is a recurring threat in Nakivale. UCF’s answer is a treatment plant the community builds and runs: hardware developed and funded by partner BionerG, with running costs met long-term by biochar revenue and a nominal charge for daily water.
The problem
Around 200,000 refugees live in Nakivale, and many draw water from sources that carry E. coli and cholera. Outbreaks arrive with the rains; families know the risk and often have no alternative source.
Trucked water and chlorine tablets help, but they are external fixes that end when funding does. The community needed treatment infrastructure it could own and operate.
How the plant works
Four filter beds, then ultraviolet
- 1Rockscoarse debris
- 2Gravelsediment
- 3Sandfine particles
- 4Biocharcontaminants
- 5UVpathogen removal
Water from the completed first-phase plant was tested by Ugandan Government pathology laboratories and came back withzero pathogens (read the lab results), meeting WHO drinking-water guidelines. Production plants will be monitored on a schedule matched to their scale. The design comes from UCF’s UK biochar partner BionerG, led by Lionel Clarke OBE. The Clarke family, led by Mary Clarke, funded the entire facility.
Stage four is made a few hundred meters away by Nakivale’s own accredited biochar team, so filter beds can be replaced whenever needed without imported materials. Revenue from the biochar enterprise will maintain the system, and the kilns sterilise spent filter biochar for reuse as a soil improver.
Where it stands
As of August 2026: three filter-bed treatment tanks, fully funded by the Clarke family, are built and awaiting commissioning. Together they treble the plant’s clean-water output. The plant is designed to hand a 20-litre jerry can of safe water to each of thousands of households every day.
The work complies with the requirements of UNHCR and Nsamizi, the settlement’s implementing partner for water.
How the plants pay for themselves
Each plant runs on a local business model. A small charge per 20-litre jerry can (about one per household per day), topped up by carbon-market income from biochar, pays for upkeep, security, and refugee-run distribution. That price is lower than any other clean water in the settlement, and the supply more reliable.
The design can be reproduced across Nakivale, putting safe water within reach of all 250,000 residents. That expansion needs dedicated philanthropic funding.
How we measure the health impact
A research team of Dr Desire Uzele (medical officer), Dr Roslyn Philips (public health), and Dr Japhet Nayituriki (disease specialist) plans baseline health surveys with 25 community workers, repeated every six months, alongside data gathered from users at the plant itself.
Wider benefits to the community
Beyond direct health gains, reliable safe water frees up time and resources. Caregivers, often women, spend less time nursing preventable water-related illness, and local health services face less avoidable demand.
Videos from the settlement
The campaign
Fund the next plant
Every gift extends safe water to more of the settlement. Today gifts run through GoFundMe. They are personal gifts, not tax-deductible; a vetted tax-deductible channel is in progress. You’ll complete your gift securely on GoFundMe.
Support us