Water is essential to human well-being and economic development. Today, however, water stress caused by inadequate farming practices, demographic pressure and pollution is creating unprecedented problems. Nowhere is this more visible than in the rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. As the world celebrates World Water Day on the 22nd of March to draw attention to these issues, lessons learned from the Millennium Villages Project can provide a way forward.

Fourteen year old Eugene Obare and his friends from Nyamuninia Primary School in Sauri, Kenya were invited to address a packed amphitheatre of delegates at the International Food Fair on October 7th. They are a new breed of happy, confident kids in rural Kenya who love going to school, where they are achieving good grades and dream of becoming engineers and pilots like others their age. What makes these students particularly special, as the delegates discovered, is that they run one of the country’s most successful school feeding program in an area traditionally steeped in poverty.