Save the Rain
Save the Rain is dedicated to ending the Global Water Crisis. While most organisations drill down, they look up: since 2005, they have been harvesting rainwater to bring about lasting change in water-scarce communities.
One in three children worldwide lives in water scarcity. Climate change is an increasing threat to groundwater resources, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. In these areas, water is women’s work. They walk long miles and hours to get it. The walk is unsafe, and so is the water, if they find any.
Their entry into communities begins with primary schools, where they build 150,000-litre rainwater harvesting systems. The ripple effect is profound: providing students with safe water improves their health, attendance, and academic performance.
Their all-female teams construct 5,000-litre domestic rainwater harvesting systems for families. Safe, clean water at home empowers recipients to unleash their potential as catalysts for social change.
The relationship
There's a principle that’s as universal as gravity: the longer the lever, the more effective the effort. Time is the lever here — and ours is long.
Over the years, we've been in the field alongside the Save the Rain team, photographed the communities they serve, interviewed those who build the tanks and those who receive them, and watched children grow up safe from ever knowing what it is to walk for water. We know the organisation's voice and history.
The practical result is that we can do the work of a full-scale communications team, with a fraction of the overhead. The brief can be as little as an unfinished sentence. The channels are always open. We know where things are.
The work
We direct, manage, and produce all communications: monthly newsletters, daily social media across multiple platforms, grant applications, marketing materials — all written, designed, and produced in-house. We conduct field interviews in Swahili, develop and write the stories, and photograph and film to a documentary standard. We curate and manage a vast visual archive, so nothing is lost and everything stays findable.
This work is made possible by the institutional knowledge that only time can build.
We made a book
To mark Save the Rain’s 20th birthday, we produced Women & Water: a coffee table book that is, in every sense, the full weight of two decades.
We did everything: conceived and curated the stories, conducted the interviews, wrote the copy, took the photographs, designed the book, and managed its production and schedule from start to finish. The result holds twenty years of transformation — and the people who brought it about.
The story
Elizabeth’s story was a decade in the making.
We first arrived in Nkoansiyo in 2015, photographing a rainwater harvesting system being built at the primary school. A decade later, we drove back at dawn and spent the day with Elizabeth — one of the women who builds tanks for Save the Rain — following her from her kitchen to the school gates and out into the field.
The story we wrote reached into every dimension of impact: generational change, education, women's economic agency, and a community transformed.
Water for our daughters
Elizabeth starts her day before dawn, making milky chai for her daughter Aviela as she prepares for school. Solomon, Aviela's little brother, is four and fast asleep. Aviela, who is nearly 11, pulls on her school uniform and gathers her books. Nkoansiyo Primary is just down the road, and she joins her classmates for the walk. Next, Elizabeth prepares her husband's lunch — she will be working all day, while he stays at home with Solomon and their livestock. The kitchen she cooks in is part of an old structure. Their new home was built with her Save the Rain income. She picks greens from her greenhouse and draws water from her tank. Her cattle and goats provide milk. She farms corn and beans to feed her family. Elizabeth is both the breadwinner and the bread maker.She has been building rainwater harvesting systems since 2015. She is a member of the King’ori team, a group of women whose day job it is to deliver transformation through strength, love, and the medium of water. They are a testament to the exponential power that is unleashed when the natural forces of women and water are combined.When we arrived in Nkoansiyo, our work brought us into people's homes and into their lives. Building tanks builds trust. Disabled children who had been hidden in shame and secrecy came to light for the first time. We had already constructed a 150,000-liter system at the school, so we added ramps and wheelchairs to pave the way for their education. As a result, Aviela and her peers unlearned the stigma that traditionally surrounds disability. She was among the many who celebrated the graduation of Nkoansiyo Primary's first disabled students.Elizabeth's story speaks to the ways in which water can bring about generational change. If you were to plot the tale of her days, 2015 would stand out as a clear pivot point — a watermark, if you will. It is where Aviela stepped into a different life than her mother's. Aviela has never known what it is to walk for water — and she never will. Hers is a world where “water” and “enough” are synonymous. Her concept of “mother” is a woman who embodies power, provides for the family, and is respected by her community for her strength and her work to bring about transformation. Since this pivotal point, the women of Save the Rain have built hundreds of domestic tanks in Nkoansiyo alone and thousands more across the other communities we serve. Multiply the transformation that has rippled out from Elizabeth across tens of thousands of daughters, and you begin to see what generational change means to us. The principal of Nkoansiyo Primary once told us that Save the Rain will be remembered forever, but that is the opposite of our intention. If scarcity is what brought us here, we want sufficiency, plenitude, and thriving abundance to wash that memory away. We will know we've been successful if, in years to come, no one remembers our name. Aviela is among the first harbingers of that success.
Does this sound like you?
The work we do for Save the Rain is what a long partnership makes possible. The scope is wide — the whole of their communications — and the depth is what makes it work.
If you're looking for a communications partner who does more the longer they're there, we'd love to talk.