For years, families in a rural Kenyan region walked miles just to reach distant ponds, the only water source available to them, even though it was frequently contaminated and unsafe to drink. Now, thanks to a student-led engineering project that began as coursework in Tempe, clean water is flowing at two rural schools serving roughly 500 students.
The project, completed by Arizona State University students, connects the schools to a sustainable water system drawing from an underground aquifer located between the two campuses, according to ABC15 Arizona. The station, which first reported the completed borehole well, says the student-led team spent nearly a year planning, fundraising, designing and coordinating the effort before traveling overseas to help implement it alongside local contractors, community members and students. Reporter Cameron Polom detailed how the idea originated as an engineering project in Tempe before growing into an international infrastructure build.
The work was carried out by ASU's chapter of Engineers Without Borders, which has worked in the region since 2011 and has completed multiple humanitarian engineering projects focused on improving quality of life through sustainable solutions, per the same account. Students traveled thousands of miles from Tempe to the Kenyan community to see the project through to completion, a trip that capped nearly a year of behind-the-scenes preparation back on campus.
A Years-Long Cycle of Trial and Error
The borehole well is only the latest chapter in a much longer engineering effort. Just last October, ASU News reported that 22 student members of the chapter had developed and tested a sand-based water filtration system in Naki, Kenya, after discovering that water stored in a restored 20,000-gallon community tank remained unsanitary, according to ASU News. That trial-and-error approach traces back over a decade: the chapter won a national Premier Project Award from EWB-USA in March 2014 for designing rainwater catchment systems and repairing a surface dam in Kenya's Bondo-Rarieda district, ASU News reported at the time.
Funding for the clean water initiatives came in part from donations through ASU's Change the World initiative and a Global Education Office Go Global grant awarded to the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, according to ASU News. The Fulton Schools enrolled 32,378 students in 2025, making it the largest engineering school in the country, per data cited by the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. That scale helps explain how a project that started as classroom work in Tempe could evolve into a multi-year, multi-phase infrastructure build thousands of miles away.
Why Clean Water Access Still Matters in Rural Kenya
The stakes behind the project are laid out in national data. According to the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, cited by People Daily, 16% of households nationwide still rely on unimproved surface water sources like ponds and rivers for drinking, even though 71% of rural residents now have access to improved water sources. UNICEF Kenya reported in 2022 that roughly 9.9 million Kenyans drink directly from contaminated surface water, leaving rural populations vulnerable to preventable waterborne pathogens.
Those risks carry real health consequences. The World Health Organization estimated in September 2023 that microbiologically contaminated drinking water causes approximately 505,000 diarrhoeal deaths globally each year, with young children in low-resource settings facing the highest risk. Against that backdrop, a reliable well serving two schools represents a small but concrete dent in a much larger public health challenge.
Part of a Broader Academic and Volunteer Pipeline
The Kenya work fits within a broader academic structure at ASU, where international service learning is built into formal pathways like the Grand Challenges Scholars Program and Engineering Projects in Community Service, according to information shared via ASU's CampusESP platform. Beyond East Africa, the university's Engineers Without Borders chapter has also carried out humanitarian engineering projects in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and locally in Arizona with the Navajo Nation, according to the ASU Student Hub's chapter page.
ASU is not alone in this kind of work. In July 2026, Howard University's Engineers Without Borders chapter received national recognition from NCEES for designing and installing a borehole groundwater system serving a rural community in Homa Bay County, Kenya, according to African American Voice. It's a reminder that student-driven borehole projects have become a recurring focus for American university chapters working in rural Kenya, even as each one starts as a local classroom exercise before becoming a years-long commitment overseas.
