Carmel senior Riya Koya founds nonprofit, brings water to Ethiopia

By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com

This summer, Carmel High School senior Riya Koya founded a nonprofit called Wishing4Wells.

In recent months, Wishing4Wells has raised $5,000, distributed clean-water tablets to help approximately 170 families in Ethiopia in extreme danger of thirst, and repaired a broken water pump with local partners. The organization has also launched a Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Ambassador program, which is a student team recruiting across the world to scale the work.

The Reporter spoke with Koya about the origins of this nonprofit, its fundraising efforts, and some details about how it helps bring clean water to those in need.

“I had this idea for a long time, but the nonprofit was established this summer, and we have been fundraising ever since,” Koya said. “We were able to finish our project in late September, but this is something that I’ve always wanted to do since I was a kid.”

Koya’s primary fundraising efforts have been through online donations.

“Specifically, we’ve had a lot of our WASH ambassadors basically just ask their friends and family for donations and we were able to raise about $5,000 that way,” Koya said. “We were also able to have garage sales, so people were able to sell some of the belongings that they didn’t really need anymore. Also, we’re planning to have a 5K walk to symbolize the distance that people have to walk to gain access to water in those water-scarce areas.”

According to Koya, Wishing4Wells has 25 volunteers in Carmel, with 52 total volunteers.

“We have a lot of student volunteers here in Carmel, and we also have student volunteers that are across America and also some in Africa as well,” Koya said. “We have partnered with a nonprofit there to do the physical work of fixing and the maintenance of the hand pumps. They’re called the Holistic Relief Organization (HRO), so they’re the people on the field that are maintaining those pumps. We were able to rehabilitate two water pumps which served 2,200 households in the Ethiopia region. In terms of those clean water tablets, we were able to provide a total of 6,000 sachets, which is basically a packet of water. We gave 30 to each household.”

In addition to the direct, emergency assistance, Wishing4Wells and HRO are providing education for long-term help.

“We were able to train people in water conservation practices, making sure a crisis like this doesn’t happen again,” Koya said. “We were able to train especially a lot of the women and children in how to make sure how you can serve water better and also have better hygiene practices so that we can help prevent these kinds of situations in the future.”

If you’d like to help Wishing4Wells continue their good work, you can donate through Zelle to wearewishing4wells@gmail.com.