Water and classrooms,
verified on the ground.

The floodplain west of Lake Malawi holds water eleven months of the year. Almost none of it is safe to drink. In Chikondi, the nearest tested source was a nine-kilometer round trip, usually walked twice a day, usually by girls who should have been in class.

We are drilling fourteen boreholes across six villages, each fitted with an Afridev handpump and a locally elected maintenance committee that holds its own repair fund. Nine are flowing. The remaining five are scheduled before the November rains close the access roads.

There is no road to Serigaun. Every bag of cement, every sheet of roofing, every box of exercise books came up the porter trail from the Tila river valley — a six-hour climb. The village had a school on paper. In practice it had one room, a dirt floor, and 84 enrolled children.

The three-classroom block opened in April 2026, built to Nepal's post-2015 seismic code by a crew hired within the district. Enrollment is up to 117. The district education office, not us, pays the two new teachers — which is the point.

The spring above Ccotos runs clean and cold all year. The village sits 340 vertical meters below it. For decades that gap was covered by a failing 1980s pipe that lost most of its flow to cracks and froze every July.

The new gravity-fed main is 17 kilometers of HDPE pipe, trenched below frost depth by work crews from the four communities it serves. No pumps, no fuel, no electricity bill — the mountain does the work. Water committees in each community set tariffs of about one sol per family per month for upkeep.

Lokitaung's primary school had desks, books, and teachers. What it did not have was light. Sunset ends the school day fast this close to the equator, and kerosene costs what a family here earns in an afternoon.

A 12-kilowatt solar array and battery bank now run the school's six classrooms, a staff room, and evening study hours four nights a week. Exam-year students log the extra time; attendance at evening sessions has held above ninety percent since March. The county has asked us to price the same system for three neighboring schools.