Water Ministry Transforms Africa's Largest Slum, Yielding a 'Great Harvest' of 22,000 Souls

NAIROBI, Kenya – In Kenya, hundreds of thousands are crammed into Africa's largest slum. Known as Kibera, it's a world where hope is often in short supply. In this darkness, however, a miracle is unfolding as a Texas-based ministry goes door-to-door, bringing God's love and life-changing water filters. 

Infamous for its gritty reputation, where crime and violence lurk at nearly every corner, Kibera faces extreme poverty and gang violence, while lacking basic necessities like clean water and sanitation, earning its reputation as one of the "darkest, filthiest, and most hopeless places in the world."

Kibera is Africa's largest slum, and a typical house here measures only eight by eight feet, and it's built with mud walls, a corrugated tin roof, and either a dirt or concrete floor. There's not a bathroom in the home. There's no kitchen area in the home. It's basically for sitting and sleeping only.

Chris Beth, founder of The Bucket Ministry, first stepped into Kibera in 2017. What he saw shook him to his core. 

"There wasn't one home that had access to clean, safe drinking water," he told CBN News on a recent trip to Kibera.

Water here isn't a blessing — it's a curse.

It's a common scene here for folks to line up with jerry cans just to get water. The original source of this water is typically clean and safe to drink. But it must then travel through an intricate spiderweb-like system of pipes. The problem is that many of those pipes are broken, and contaminated water ends up getting into those pipes. 

The Bucket Ministry has shown through their research that once the water gets to a certain point, the water is still very contaminated.

"So what you see is these snaked water lines all over this place that are on the surface, and most of them are illegally connected, they're scabbed on to each other, and all of them leak," Beth described while standing near one of those pipes carrying water. "Those leaks will actually start to suck sewage water into the pipes and contaminate the entire system with E coli, maybe dysentery, typhoid, cholera."

Endless piles of trash are scattered throughout Kibera. The absence of proper sewage leaves human waste on the streets, which then ends up in the water.

The official statistics say there are 78 latrines in all Kibera serving over 400,000 people.

Beth recognized the urgent need for clean water and sent a team of 60 to canvass the slum.

"And all they did for four months was knock on every single one of the doors in this place and we found out that there were 81,077 homes," said Beth. "We found out that there's about 408,000 people created in God's image that are sequestered to live in this place."

In 2000, The Bucket Ministry began a groundbreaking effort—distributing life-saving water filters to each home here.

George Owegi, a local elder here, was initially skeptical.

"Many NGOs, many people have come, and they have never made any impact, so when I saw them I thought they are just the same like other people," Owegi told CBN News.

But this effort changed minds as Beth partnered with the Sawyer filter company to distribute plastic buckets, each equipped with a filtration system that makes contaminated water drinkable. 

"There's these straws, these membranes and the contaminants, the dirty water getting caught on the outside of these membranes," described Beth. "And then the clean water comes through the inside of the membrane."

One hundred local missionaries, mostly Kibera residents, joined in by installing filters and teaching residents how to maintain them.

Missionary leader Phoebe Wafula says the impact was clear after only about 70 days of using the filters.

"As we are speaking today, there is a lot of changes, especially through clean, safe drinking water. A lot of diseases have been eradicated," said Wafula.

The Bucket Ministry used mapping software to track every filter.

"At the point of distribution, we scan the barcode and deliver the filter to the recipient family," The Bucket Ministry's Mission Mapping software describes in a video. "We then collect baseline data on the family's physical health and spiritual orientation to chart their progress."

"And then every follow-up visitation, we scan the barcode again and we collect new data," added Beth.

The result is visualized in the Mission Mapping software.

"What you are seeing right now is a time progression map with the blue dots being actual locations of filters distributed in the Kibera by the Bucket Ministry teams," he showed us.

Beth's team distributed 81,777 filters, providing clean water to all 408,478 residents of the slum. 

The project reached completion in December as Michael Wanjohi became the last filter recipient. "It's a miracle to me. For me it's a 100 percent miracle," exclaimed an excited Wanjohi.

And the transformation doesn't stop there.

"Water is the secondary reason why we are there," declared Beth. "The gospel is the sole reason."

Missionaries visited every single home here, sharing the gospel.

"Next: you will see white dots populating," the narrator in the Mission Mapping software describes. "These white dots represent where our local missionary teams have witnessed professions of faith by the families that have received the life-saving water filters and heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. Again, these are precise GPS positions and dates of the interaction."

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Local pastor and 44-year resident Raphael Dihanda tells CBN News no NGO has ever shared the gospel so widely in Kibera.

"When The Bucket Ministry came in, and they recruited the missionaries, going and supplying the filters and the buckets, people started accepting the gospel," said Dihanda, who pastors Grace Revival Church in Kibera. "And we can see now the great harvest is coming in the Kingdom of God."

More than 22,000 people gave their lives to Christ and the miracles keep going. 

"Lastly, you will see yellow dots populating on the top of the blue and white dots," he says, describing the mapping software. "These represent the actual locations and dates of when our teams have taught ongoing discipleship lessons in the homes of filter recipients."

The team shared over half a million discipleship lessons.

"Nobody has ever done this. Nobody has ever done this," Dihanda told CBN News. "Thinking of visiting someone's house once, twice, thrice. It has never been done."

Owegi says the spiritual effects rippled across the slum, transforming lives in ways no one expected.

"People are testifying, people are leaving crime, they are changing their ways and they have reformed," said Owegi.

Prostitution, which had been a survival mechanism for so many women in Kibera, also began to fade.

"People didn't know Christ but what we have done and the work that has been done in Kibera, through God, is really tremendous," declared Wafula.

More than 1,500 people were baptized, including Samuel Mwang.

"I was a very bad person before today, I was untrustworthy, I was a thief, a drug addict, but God healed me," Mwang told CBN News after emerging from the baptismal pool. "Missionaries visited my home and told me about Jesus Christ, and I accepted Him into my life.

With work in Kibera complete, Beth's team is now taking the mission to another nearby slum. The Bucket Ministry is now targeting the community on the outskirts of Nairobi known as Kawangware as their next project. 

According to their initial assessment, there are about 153,000 homes.

Work began January 1st with 3,429 water filters already distributed and 1,075 people giving their lives to Jesus Christ, so far. 

Beth aims to reach all 710,000 residents here with the gospel's living water within the next four years.