#water-access

🇲🇽 Mexico · Un Salto de Vida

The waterfall at El Salto once drew honeymooners; industrial discharge turned it into a wall of chemical foam, and every one of 178 residents tested had heavy metals in their body.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Africa Sand Dam Foundation

A Kenyan NGO that has helped drylands communities build 680 stone sand dams across seasonal rivers, banking rainy-season flow underground where it can't evaporate or run dry.

🇵🇪 Peru · Aquafondo (Fondo de Agua para Lima y Callao)

Lima's water fund is rehabilitating pre-Inca infiltration canals high in the Andes so rain captured in the wet season keeps the capital's rivers flowing through the dry months.

🇦🇫 Afghanistan · DACAAR (Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees)

Afghanistan's largest WASH NGO drills wells, monitors groundwater and rebuilds water networks across all 34 provinces, even as aid budgets shrink.

🇮🇳 India · Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG)

In flood-prone Gorakhpur, women farmers are turning the city's peri-urban wetlands and fields into working flood buffers that also feed their families.

🇸🇻 El Salvador · Caminos de Acción

A grassroots nonprofit is bringing household water storage, filtration, and sanitation to a rural Salvadoran community where contaminated water once left most residents with parasites.

🇲🇦 Morocco · Foundation Dar Si Hmad (FDSH)

A women-led Moroccan NGO built North Africa's largest fog-harvesting system, turning Atlantic sea mist into piped drinking water for remote Anti-Atlas villages.

🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina · Center for Environment (Centar za životnu sredinu)

A Banja Luka NGO whose river-protection campaigns persuaded Bosnia's second-largest city, and a dozen more municipalities, to pledge no new dams on their rivers.

🇰🇷 South Korea · Seoul Metropolitan Government

Seoul demolished an elevated highway and daylighted a buried stream, turning 5.8 kilometers of concrete into a cooler, wildlife-rich green corridor through downtown.

🇨🇱 Chile · CECPAN

On an island where wells run dry each summer, the spongy pompón moss bogs are the water supply — so Chiloé's naturalists got them written into law as nature sanctuaries.

🇫🇯 Fiji · Live & Learn Fiji

From mangrove replanting to cyclone-ready water systems, rural Fijian villages are building their own climate defences with Indigenous knowledge at the core.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development (MCD)

Along Vietnam's storm-battered coast, fishing and farming communities are pairing mangrove restoration with climate-adaptive livelihoods to ride out the next typhoon.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Practical Action

Community-run gauge readers and telephone chains now give flood-prone Nepali villages hours of extra warning before rivers burst their banks.

🇭🇳 Honduras · Agua Para el Pueblo

A Honduran NGO builds community-run drinking water treatment plants that bring clean, piped water to towns once dependent on contaminated sources.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Duzi-uMngeni Conservation Trust (DUCT)

Since 2005, DUCT has been watchdog and rehab crew for the uMsunduzi and uMngeni Rivers, pairing water-quality monitoring with jobs for the communities living along their banks.

🇺🇸 United States · Groundwork Hudson Valley

Groundwork Hudson Valley uncovered a river buried under a Yonkers parking lot for 90 years, turning it back into a living stream and public park.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Tanzania Forest Conservation Group (TFCG)

Tanzania's largest forest-focused NGO works with mountain communities to protect the ancient Eastern Arc cloud forests.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Drinkwell

Drinkwell installs water kiosks using patented filtration resins to remove arsenic and other contaminants from drinking water in Bangladesh.

🌍 Global · EcoPeace Middle East

Trinational NGO uniting Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian environmentalists to restore the shared Jordan River basin.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Glaciares Chilenos

Chile holds more than 80% of South America's glaciers, and this citizen-founded foundation is racing to get them taught in schools and written into law before they vanish.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · EthioTrees Ecosystem Restoration Association

Landless and smallholder farmers in Ethiopia's Tembien highlands are regenerating degraded mountain slopes with exclosures, hillside terraces and native trees, funded by carbon credits they control.

🇱🇷 Liberia · FACE Africa

A Liberian-founded nonprofit builds wells, latrines and rainwater systems while training women-majority water committees across rural Liberia.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Fisheries Action Coalition Team (FACT)

A Phnom Penh-based coalition of Cambodian NGOs helping lakeside communities set up protected fish refuges in the flooded forests of Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia's largest lake.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fondo para la Protección del Agua (FONAG)

The world's first water fund pays to protect and restore Quito's high-Andean páramo grassland, the source of most of the city's drinking water.

🇺🇸 United States · Friends of the Everglades

Founded in 1969 by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, this Florida watchdog group sues, lobbies and campaigns to send clean fresh water flowing south again through the Everglades wetlands.

🇪🇸 Spain · Fundación Global Nature

Since 1990, this Spanish foundation has been re-flooding a steppe lagoon drained decades ago, turning wheat fields back into a wintering ground for tens of thousands of geese and cranes.

🇨🇭 Switzerland · GLAMOS (Glacier Monitoring Switzerland)

Since scientists first measured Swiss glacier tongues in 1880, this joint university network has kept an unbroken record of how fast the Alps' ice is disappearing.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Kenya Red Cross Society

Instead of waiting for a drought to become a crisis, Kenya Red Cross now releases cash, seeds and water repairs the moment forecasts turn ugly.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Gift of the Givers Foundation

Founded by Imtiaz Sooliman in 1992, South Africa's largest disaster-relief NGO drills boreholes, runs desalination plants, and trucks millions of litres of water to communities in crisis across Africa and beyond.

🇰🇪 Kenya · GivePower

Solar-powered desalination in shipping containers turns seawater into affordable drinking water for coastal Kenya.

🇮🇳 India · Gram Vikas

A rural Odisha NGO refuses to install a single tap or toilet in a village until every household, rich or poor, agrees to join in and build them together.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · Gravity Water

A nonprofit installing gravity-powered rainwater harvesting and filtration systems that give Vietnamese schools reliable, energy-free safe drinking water.

🇨🇲 Cameroon · Green Cameroon

A Buea-based grassroots NGO that replants degraded slopes around Mount Cameroon and restores community water sources across all ten of Cameroon's regions.

🇺🇸 United States · Borderlands Restoration Network

Borderlands Restoration Network installs thousands of erosion-control structures across the Sky Islands drylands of the US-Mexico borderlands to heal gullied land and recharge groundwater.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Hippo Roller

A 90-litre rolling barrel that lets rural families move five buckets' worth of water in a single easy trip.

🇮🇳 India · Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL)

In the cold desert of Ladakh, engineers and villagers freeze winter meltwater into towering "ice stupas" that release irrigation water just when spring-sown crops need it most.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Isla Urbana

Installs rainwater harvesting systems that bring reliable water to Mexican homes and schools cut off from municipal supply.

🇲🇭 Marshall Islands · Jo-Jikum

Marshallese teenagers turn traditional weaving and songwriting into climate advocacy that reaches all the way to COP summits.

🇳🇮 Nicaragua · blueEnergy

Since 2004, this off-grid engineering nonprofit has been wiring solar power and clean water into isolated Caribbean-coast Nicaraguan communities.

🇺🇬 Uganda · Project Pressure

Uganda's Rwenzori range holds Africa's last tropical glaciers, and this charity's expeditions are racing to map them in 3D before they disappear entirely within years.

🇨🇾 Cyprus · Terra Cypria - The Cyprus Conservation Foundation

On an island where dam levels have dropped to a fraction of capacity, this Limassol-based foundation mapped every wetland in Cyprus and now fights to keep its rivers and salt lakes alive.

🇮🇳 India · Project Bawri

A community-driven initiative restoring centuries-old stepwells across Rajasthan so monsoon rain can once again recharge village aquifers.

🇷🇸 Serbia · RERI (Renewables and Environmental Regulatory Institute)

A Belgrade legal watchdog using Serbia's own regulations to fight illegally sited small hydropower plants that were draining protected mountain rivers.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto SOS Pantanal

After record wildfires torched a quarter of the Pantanal wetland, this Brazilian NGO is paying Indigenous communities to grow and plant native seedlings that heal burned springs and riverbanks.

🇮🇳 India · Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR)

WOTR mobilizes villages across India's drought-prone drylands to build check-dams, contour trenches and ponds that recharge groundwater and bring barren common land back into production.

🇮🇳 India · Tarun Bharat Sangh

India's 'Waterman' Rajendra Singh turned a dying craft of earthen check dams into a movement that brought dried-up Rajasthan rivers back to life.

🇧🇴 Bolivia · Fundación Natura Bolivia

Bolivian farmers protect the forests that feed their taps, paid in beehives and fruit trees instead of cash.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Borneo Nature Foundation

In fire-scarred peat-swamp forest that once burned nearly every dry season, this Borneo charity is replanting native trees and rewetting drained peat so the land stops fueling the next blaze.

🇯🇲 Jamaica · Southern Trelawny Environmental Agency (STEA)

A community-rooted Trelawny NGO is replanting native forest in Jamaica's Cockpit Country, the karst wilderness that supplies 40 percent of the island's freshwater.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · River Action UK

A fast-growing charity is suing water companies and industrial chicken farms to rescue England's sewage- and slurry-choked rivers.

🇸🇰 Slovakia · People and Water (Ľudia a voda)

A Slovak NGO's low-cost check dams, ponds and swales rewet drought-cracked farmland, restoring the landscape's natural water cycle one village at a time.

🇵🇪 Peru · Instituto de Montaña (The Mountain Institute Peru)

As tropical glaciers retreat, Andean communities are digging out 1,000-year-old canals and reservoirs to keep water flowing through the dry season.

🇱🇧 Lebanon · Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon (SPNL)

Lebanon's oldest environmental NGO revives the ancient Hima system of community stewardship to protect the country's rivers, wetlands and water-scarce highlands.

🌍 Global · Ryan's Well Foundation

The charity that grew from six-year-old Ryan Hreljac's first well has now funded over 1,800 water projects in 17 countries.

🇺🇬 Uganda · SPOUTS International

A Kampala social enterprise fires clay into ceramic filters so Ugandan households can stop boiling water over smoky charcoal fires.

🇯🇴 Jordan · Sahara Forest Project

Norwegian-designed facility in Jordan's desert growing vegetables using seawater-cooled greenhouses and concentrated solar power.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · ECOTON

A quarter-litre of water from a Brantas tributary held 1,449 microplastic particles — fifteen times what other rivers carry — and seventeen million people drink from that system.

🇾🇪 Yemen · Socotra Dragon Blood Tree Association

French and Socotri islanders are raising community tree nurseries, beehives and water pipelines to save Socotra's iconic, storm-battered dragon blood trees.

🇲🇷 Mauritania · Gret

Gret's multifunctional solar platforms bring electricity, mills and clean water to Mauritanian villages too remote or small for the national grid.

🇵🇸 Palestine · Comet-ME (Community, Energy and Technology in the Middle East)

An Israeli-Palestinian NGO builds solar-and-wind hybrid mini-grids and water systems for herding communities in the South Hebron Hills who are barred from connecting to the electric grid.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha

A fleet of solar-powered boats turns into classrooms, libraries and clinics for children in Bangladesh's flood-prone river districts.

🇩🇯 Djibouti · Impact Water Solutions

A solar-powered, battery-free desalination unit on Lake Ghoubet delivers free drinking water to a Djiboutian community that had none.

🇰🇪 Kenya · SunCulture

A Kenyan climate-tech company sells pay-as-you-go solar irrigation pumps that let smallholder farmers grow food year-round without diesel fuel or grid power.

🇹🇩 Chad · Water4Chad

Chadian drilling teams are sinking solar-powered wells across the country's driest regions, freeing communities from hours-long walks to contaminated water.

🇸🇩 Sudan · Sudanese Environment Conservation Society (SECS)

Sudan's oldest environmental NGO keeps a 113-branch volunteer network running climate-resilience and conservation projects despite the ongoing war.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Save the Vaal Environment (SAVE)

A committee of Vaal River residents has spent three decades hauling South African officials to court to stop raw sewage from destroying the country's third-longest river.

🇺🇸 United States · Riverkeeper

The original riverkeeper patrol boat that inspired a global movement still hunts down pollution on the Hudson and safeguards drinking water for millions of New Yorkers.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Porgera Red Wara (River) Women's Association

Only a handful of industrial mines on Earth still tip their tailings straight into a river. Three of them are in Papua New Guinea, and the women downstream named theirs the Red River.

🇮🇳 India · South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP)

A Delhi-based network of river researchers scrutinizes every major dam in South Asia to expose the flooding, displacement and biodiversity loss they cause.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · Central-Asian Institute for Applied Geosciences (CAIAG)

In the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges that feed Central Asia's rivers, this Bishkek-based institute runs high-mountain observatories tracking the glaciers millions depend on for water.

🇪🇹 Ethiopia · Warka Water Inc.

Bamboo towers designed by architect Arturo Vittori harvest up to 100 liters of drinking water a day from fog, dew, and rain.

🌍 Global · Water.org

Matt Damon and Gary White's nonprofit unlocking safe water and sanitation through small, affordable WaterCredit loans.

🌍 Global · charity: water

Nonprofit funding clean water projects in 29 countries, with 100% of public donations going to the field.