Living beside the sea does not guarantee access to drinking water. Salt makes the most visible local supply unsuitable for ordinary drinking, while drought can put other sources under pressure.
When this story first ran in 2019, about 2.2 billion people in the world did not have access to drinking water services that are managed safely, on a planet that is 71 percent covered by water. The latest WHO/UNICEF estimate, for 2024, is 2.1 billion people, about one in four. Turning seawater into drinking water is one response, and one small example of it is in Kiunga, a fishing town in Kenya near the border with Somalia.
In Kiunga, on Kenya’s northern coast, GivePower developed a Solar Water Farm that combines solar electricity with water treatment and desalination. The project connects two practical resources and needs: available sunlight and the demand for fresh water.
Why Kiunga was chosen
GivePower’s account of its first Solar Water Farm describes Kiunga as a coastal fishing community affected by prolonged drought and difficult access to clean water. Nearby seawater made desalination a relevant option.
The 2019 feature added the wider context: a UNICEF and WHO report published that year said one in three people in the world did not have access to safe drinking water, with conditions worst in sub-Saharan Africa. It also explained why solar power mattered: a typical desalination plant uses a lot of energy and is expensive to run, so it can only operate where there is enough power to produce and distribute that much water. GivePower’s answer was to pair the equipment with its own solar panels and batteries.
The word “first” belongs to GivePower’s project history. It should not be expanded into a claim that nobody had combined solar power and desalination anywhere in the world before.
The household problem behind the installation
The earlier Kiunga report described residents spending about an hour collecting water during dry conditions and relying on a source shared with animals. That account, attributed there to Bright Side’s project coverage, describes the difficulty the installation was intended to address. It is historical reporting, not a current survey of every household’s access or a laboratory water-quality result.
The original equipment description paired solar panels with battery storage and pumps, explaining why storage mattered when sunlight was unavailable. GivePower also discussed extending the approach to Haiti and Colombia. Those ambitions belong to the project’s development story; they should not be read as proof that every proposed site was subsequently completed or that every resident receives uninterrupted service.
Project coverage republished by GivePower dates the Kiunga installation to July 2018 and describes Tesla battery storage and two parallel pumps. Another report carried on the provider’s site gives the solar installation a 50-kilowatt rating. In that description, batteries store daytime electricity for use when the sun is unavailable, and the second pump allows operation to continue while one pump receives maintenance. These are the reported design features of the project at that time; they do not establish independently measured uptime or the condition of the equipment today.
Sunlight supplies energy; treatment makes the water usable
The organisation describes a system that uses solar-powered desalination and filtration to turn seawater or brackish water into fresh water. Solar panels provide electricity for equipment; the panels themselves do not remove the salt.
That division of roles makes the idea easier to understand. An energy source supports a treatment process, and the treatment process still needs appropriate operation, monitoring and maintenance.
A similar pairing appears in research combining solar technologies with a greenhouse, where energy and water functions must be examined individually as well as together.
Read capacity as a capacity claim
GivePower states that its Solar Water Farm model can supply drinking water for up to 35,000 people per day. That is the provider’s stated service capacity, rather than an independently verified count of people receiving water every day at Kiunga.
It is also different from the population of the village itself. A facility can be designed to serve a wider area, while actual reach depends on distribution, demand and continued operation.
What GivePower later reported about the plant
In a later report on its own site, GivePower described the Kiunga plant as pumping water from shallow wells near the ocean, filtering it, putting it through reverse osmosis and chlorinating it, producing about 75,000 litres of clean water a day for some 15,000 residents of the Kiunga area. The same report said the plant was built with $565,000 after a request from residents, kept running around the clock during COVID-19 restrictions, and returns about 6 litres of brine to the ocean for every 2 litres of fresh water.
Those figures help put the earlier claims in proportion. 75,000 litres a day shared among 35,000 people would be just over two litres each, enough for drinking but not for cooking and washing, so the 15,000-resident figure describes the service more realistically. The brine figure also bears on the 2019 feature’s statement that, according to GivePower, the water quality is better than that of a typical desalination plant and that the process does not even have the negative environmental impact desalination usually causes, because the extraction of salt produces saline residues harmful to animals and plants. Returning three times as much brine as fresh water is the normal trade-off of reverse osmosis; whether it harms the local sea depends on how it is discharged, which the reports do not describe.
What makes a water project dependable?
The lasting questions concern everyday service: how water quality is checked, how faults are repaired, whether users can obtain the water reliably and how the system handles the concentrated salt stream produced by desalination.
Solar power is a valuable feature, but it does not by itself demonstrate zero environmental impact. A complete assessment includes the treatment process, equipment and local receiving environment.
Those details need not diminish the achievement. They describe the work that allows a useful installation to remain useful after its opening photographs have been shared.
A practical form of hope
Water infrastructure becomes meaningful in the ordinary routines it supports. Reliable access is the outcome worth following over time.
For another project using solar electricity around waterways, explore The Ocean Cleanup’s river Interceptor. The tasks are different—supplying fresh water and collecting floating debris—but both become clearer when we look beyond the impressive machine to the service around it.
GivePower’s original project posts
These dated posts document the organisation’s account of the installation. Capacity and environmental claims remain subject to the distinctions discussed above.
GivePower (@givepowerfoundation) on
GivePower (@givepowerfoundation) on
GivePower (@givepowerfoundation) on
More images
Video and posts
Questions to ask of any water project
Output figures need a unit and a time period. Litres per day only become “people served” once someone assumes how much water each person receives: purely as an illustration, 10,000 litres a day could mean 1,000 allocations of ten litres or 2,000 of five. Dependable access also depends on the whole chain from intake and treatment to storage and collection, and on someone having the parts and responsibility to fix faults. Finally, each claim needs its own dated evidence: solar output for the energy supply, water-quality results for the treatment, distribution records for who actually receives the water, and information on how the concentrated brine is handled.
Global water figures from the 2019 feature, checked
The 2020 article ended with a set of global water figures. They are kept here with their sources and, where the numbers have moved, a current figure.
- By 2025, half of the planet’s population was projected to live in areas facing water scarcity (a projection in an earlier WHO fact sheet); the current WHO fact sheet says more than 2 billion people lived in water-stressed countries in 2021. The reuse of wastewater to recover nutrients or energy, and the treatment of seawater, are becoming central strategies.
- Only about 2.5 percent of the planet’s water is freshwater (World Bank Data Blog, 6 September 2013); according to the USGS, more than 68 percent of that freshwater is locked up in ice and glaciers and another 30 percent is underground.
- GivePower said it had installed solar panels at more than 2,500 schools, businesses and emergency services in 17 countries (the organisation’s own figure at the time) and was raising money for more “solar water farms”. (Update, October 2026: the encyclopaedia entry on the organisation puts the total at 2,650 solar installations in 17 countries by 2018 (Wikipedia, GivePower).)
- World Water Day is celebrated every year on 22 March to raise awareness about the conservation, development and responsible use of water.
- Around 3,000 litres of water are needed to produce enough food for one person’s daily needs (FAO estimate). (Correction: FAO’s published estimate is about 2,800 litres a day, based on roughly one litre of water per calorie and an average requirement of about 2,800 calories (FAO, Water is key to food security); its water fact sheet gives a range of 2,000 to 5,000 litres per person per day (FAO water facts).)
- Downloading one gigabyte of data might use up to 200 litres of water to cool data centres and generate their electricity; the Imperial College researchers behind the 2015 estimate called it a high-end value and stressed the large uncertainty.
- Eighty percent of wastewater was said to be released into waterways without proper treatment, a widely quoted older estimate; UN-Water’s more recent monitoring found that 42 percent of household wastewater was not safely treated in 2022.
- Taking a ten-minute shower every day uses the equivalent of more than 100,000 glasses of water a year (UN Environment, “Ahorrar agua, una gota a la vez”, 29 March 2019).
- Latin America receives almost 30 percent of the planet’s rainfall and has about 28,000 cubic metres of water per person each year, above the world average (FAO; the figures appear in FAO’s World Water Day press release of 22 March 2012).
- Among the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, the UN set a goal of universal and equitable access to drinking water, adequate sanitation and hygiene, and reduced water pollution.
Related reading: Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon: The Proposal, Design and Funding Decision.
Sources, credits and background: UNICEF’s historical water-access report · GivePower’s grant and expansion announcement · Desalination background · GivePower’s original project post · WHO drinking-water background.
Additional background cited in the 2020 article: Freshwater distribution background · GivePower organization profile · World Water Day background · FAO water-and-food background cited in the earlier feature · Imperial College’s historical data-and-water discussion.
Additional background cited in the 2020 article: UNDP’s Goal 6 background · UN Environment water-conservation background · FAO’s historical Latin American water-resource report · Sustainable Development Goals background.
The background links above document the earlier report’s sources; historical global statistics and model-dependent water-use estimates should not be read as current measurements of Kiunga’s service.
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