No child should die because of dirty water. Yet in Kiribati, one in 20 children won’t make it to their fifth birthday due to contaminated water.
ChildFund New Zealand’s Pacific Learning Gap Appeal is working to change that, raising money to fund practical, locally led solutions to provide families with clean water.
“We fly a few hours and land in a place where parents are burying children over something as basic as water,” said ChildFund NZ CEO Josie Pagani, who visited Kiribati to see the crisis firsthand. “In 2025, that’s unthinkable.”
Fewer than one in four households in Kiribati has reliable access to safe drinking water. Many boil brackish water over driftwood or walk kilometres in search of something drinkable, desperate to avoid potentially deadly diseases like diarrhoea and dysentery. Pagani, a mother of three who has spent decades in international development, said witnessing Pacific children suffer from preventable waterborne diseases “lit a fire” under her.
“Nothing prepares you for watching families lose their children to something so easily prevented.”
She describes some of Kiribati’s outer islands as feeling like stepping back 500 years. “You see crumbling infrastructure, water tanks built with good intentions but left to fall apart.”
The lack of safe water affects every part of daily life.
“When children are hauling water, they aren’t in class. Parents abandon work to scour for anything safe enough to drink. Meanwhile, rising sea levels seep into wells, forcing families to resort to whatever they can find,” Pagani said.
Pagani recalled a pregnant mother who had already lost a child to dysentery and feared her next baby would face the same fate. “You can’t overstate the relief when someone arrives with a jerry can that uses sunlight to purify water,” she said. “It’s one less fear, one more reason to hope.”
To help more families across the Pacific access clean water, ChildFund NZ’s Pacific Learning Gap Appeal is funding solar-powered purification units that look like jerry cans, capable of purifying 6000 litres of safe water a year, distillation tanks, handwashing stations, and rainwater collection systems.
“For $250, you can provide a Solvatten unit that’s a guaranteed source of clean water for 10 years,” Pagani explained.
“We recently gave 373 of these units to new mothers in Betio, Kiribati, reaching over 2200 people. Kids who were too weak to attend school are finally back in the classroom.”
But Kiribati isn’t the only Pacific nation in crisis. In the Solomon Islands, where ChildFund is also working, the stakes are just as high. Two young girls died of dysentery in the same week.
“That could have been prevented with a reliable source of clean water,” Pagani said. “Every time I think about it, I’m reminded just how urgent this is.”
She emphasised that ChildFund doesn’t operate in isolation. “We work closely with local leaders and teams on the ground who know exactly what their communities need. If a well is broken, we fix it together. If a school has no handwashing station, we install one. We don’t just cut and run – we train people to maintain these solutions.”
ChildFund also taps into New Zealand’s Pacific diaspora for insight and support. “Auckland is the largest Pacific city in the world,” Pagani said. “We draw on that wealth of knowledge so everything we do resonates with families both here and back home.”
Amid the rising cost of living, some New Zealanders may hesitate to donate; but Pagani insists even a small contribution can make a difference.
“Ten or twenty dollars can help fix a broken tank or buy tools to maintain existing infrastructure. $250 gives a family clean water for 10 years. If it saves a mother from losing another child, isn’t that worth it?” asks Pagani.
“It’s not just about health. It’s about giving children their childhood, giving families a future, and ensuring no one in our Pacific region has to bury another child over a cup of dirty water.”
To donate to the Pacific Learning Gap Appeal, visit childfund.org.nz/closethegap.