About Us
Savannah Water Project is a small team with backgrounds in public health, medicine, tech, business and surgery. We started out trying to improve surgical care in northern Ghana — and we still do that work, separately. But early on, the problem underneath the problem became obvious. You can't build durable improvements in health on top of a water crisis. A surgical intervention doesn't hold if the patient goes home to drink from a stagnant pond. A public health program doesn't scale if half the children in the village have diarrhea. Clean water is the foundation. Without it, most of what gets built on top falls down.
So we shifted. We kept the medical and public health lens — the habit of asking what actually changes outcomes, and over what time frame — but the work itself became building wells.
Our Approach
We try to use local resources wherever possible. Our drilling is contracted to Ghanaian crews who know the geology, the seasons, and how to get a rig to a village the rainy season has cut off. Our project team on the ground is Ghanaian. The people who train village maintenance staff are Ghanaian. We invest heavily in that training, and in the spare-parts supply chain that makes a well repairable a year, or five years, after we've left.
This is slower than the alternative.
"Flying in a foreign team, drilling, taking photos, and flying out is faster and looks better on a brochure. It also has a much higher failure rate ten years later"
We've seen what happens when wells are built without that follow-through, and we don't want to leave any of our own behind.
Where We Work
We operate primarily in the Savannah Region of Ghana, with recent expansion into the Northern Region. We focus on farming villages — places where most people grow what they eat, and where the dry season puts everything at risk. These are also the villages most likely to be skipped over: too remote, too small, too far from the main road to be worth the trip.
That's where we start.
The Team
Director
Strategic leader with 15+ years of experience in brand development.
Operations
Operations expert specializing in workflow optimization and logistics.
Engineering
Lead engineer focused on innovative solutions and scalable systems.