Excellent Development

Have your donations doubled with our Big Give Christmas Challenge!

Christmas is just around the corner - and so is the Big Give Christmas Challenge. Read more
Make a regular donation and Create lasting change with sand dams

Regular donations provide tools, materials and ongoing guidance and support. They enable self-help groups to build a series of sand dams and boost their farming, bringing an abundance of food and water to their families, transforming lives for generations to come. Read more

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£5 could provide a group with the tools, seeds and materials to produce vegetables, fruits and grains

£10 could provide expert training and support to empower groups to take ownership of their projects

£20 enable a self-help group to build a series of sand dams, bringing abundant water to their families

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525,000 children die each year from drinking dirty water - change lives one sand dam at a time

Supporting people in drylands to build sand dams, which provide a local supply of water, means that less children die each year from curable diarrhoea and women no longer have to bare this burden. Can you help by making a donation that will stop the suffering of communities living in drylands? Read more

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£60 could provide a community with a roll of barbed wire to reinforce their sand dam and keep it anchored to the bedrock

£30 could supply a community with a rake, gardening fork, shovel and watering cans to plant fruit trees for fuel and fodder

£15 could provide a dryland farmer with drought-tolerant seeds to grow a reliable source of fresh food for their children

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What is a sand dam?

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When people have access to clean water, they can take their future into their own hands, live sustainably, and work their way out of poverty with dignity.

Watch how sand dams work

Film explaining how sand dams work and their potential impact in the world's drylands

What a sand dam would mean to us

The Matumo Tree Growers self-help group was founded in 2012, with the incentive of finding solutions to many issues the community faced due to a lack of access to clean water. We discussed the current situation and future aspirations if they were offered enough funding to build sand dams.

3,200 people benefiting from the Catipo sand dam in Mozambique

In May 2018, Excellent’s Programmes Officer, Callum Sheehan, caught up with some of the members of the Catipo community in Mozambique to see what changes their new sand dam has brought to the community.

1,000 sand dams! An Excellent milestone

Programmes Officer, Callum Sheehan, looks at various sand dam success stories as Excellent Development reaches the milestone of enabling 1,000 sand dams in drylands.

Our Impact

1,039	Number of sand dams
1,029,222	People with access to clean water
£13	Per person to provide clean water for life
1.1m	Trees planted

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Please donate what you can to transform lives with sand dams and clean water.

Excellent news

How sand dams are changing the quality of life in rural drylands

In 2015 Excellent and our partners conducted a survey into how the overall quality of life can improve during the time that communities are engaged with sand dam project work. Here are the findings. Read more

Our Strategy

1 million sand dams for 0.5 billion people by 2040

Read about our plan to directly support other organisations to build sand dams, in turn, realising our vision to support millions of the world’s poorest people by helping them to transform their own lives through water and soil conservation in drylands. Read more

When people have access to clean water, they can take their future into their own hands, live sustainably, and work their way out of poverty with dignity.

Our Impact

1,039

1,029,222

£13

1.1m

Excellent news

Our Strategy