Caminos de Agua

Mission Caminos de Agua works to improve human health and community well-being through adequate and affordable access to clean water. We work with rural communities in central Mexico, primarily in the Upper Río Laja Watershed of northern Guanajuato, where families depend on groundwater that is running out and, in many places, contains naturally occurring arsenic and fluoride. Communities decide, build, and govern their own water systems. We provide the science, engineering, training, and long-term accompaniment. Background Caminos de Agua began in 2011 with water testing in rural communities around San Miguel de Allende. What we found has shaped everything since. Of the more than 1,100 site... read more Mission Caminos de Agua works to improve human health and community well-being through adequate and affordable access to clean water. We work with rural communities in central Mexico, primarily in the Upper Río Laja Watershed of northern Guanajuato, where families depend on groundwater that is running out and, in many places, contains naturally occurring arsenic and fluoride. Communities decide, build, and govern their own water systems. We provide the science, engineering, training, and long-term accompaniment. Background Caminos de Agua began in 2011 with water testing in rural communities around San Miguel de Allende. What we found has shaped everything since. Of the more than 1,100 sites we’ve tested, roughly 60% exceed health limits for arsenic, fluoride, or both. We’ve documented arsenic up to 24 times the World Health Organization guideline and fluoride up to 18 times the Mexican limit. The water usually looks, smells, and tastes clean, and boiling and most household filters remove neither contaminant. The region faces two problems in the same aquifer. Over-extraction, driven largely by industrial agriculture and weak water governance, is draining it, while much of the water that remains is contaminated. The problems fall on the same communities, but they don’t share a solution. Reducing extraction matters for long-term water security. It won’t, on its own, make the water already in the ground safe to drink. Our work runs through three programs. Through rainwater harvesting, families have built more than 1,900 household systems across roughly 200 communities as of 2026, alongside partners including CUVAPAS, SECOPA, the San Cayetano Community Center, Fundación Gonzalo Río Arronte, Rotoplas, and municipal governments. Rainwater is naturally free of arsenic and fluoride, and families supply much of the labor: a single ferrocement system takes roughly 200 hours of community work. Where household solutions aren’t enough, Nuestra Agua treats groundwater at community scale. Arsenic is removed with commercial media, and fluoride with bone char we produce and regenerate ourselves, which has proven three to five times more efficient than comparable commercial media. Systems in Los Ricos, Alonso Yáñez, and San Elías are owned and operated by their communities. In Los Ricos, the committee has covered every maintenance expense since 2022. A Nuestra Agua system is a governance model with treatment inside it, not the other way around. The treatment works. Household use is still below where it needs to be, and closing that gap is the center of our current work. The Water School, launched in 2024 with support from the Mitsubishi Foundation, is a two-year apprenticeship training 39 young people as the next generation of local water leaders. Altogether, this work has reached more than 60,000 people. We share our water quality data openly and contribute to INCA, the national network working to understand Mexico’s arsenic and fluoride crisis. Caminos de Agua is a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit, incorporated in 2012, and a Mexican civil association, Caminos de Agua Sana, A.C., since 2018. Vision We want every family in the region drinking contaminated groundwater to have a safe, affordable option that their own community governs, and the local skills to keep it running for generations. Our near-term goal is ten community-led Nuestra Agua systems operating independently, with the regional support needed to replicate them, beginning with the State Secretariat of Water and Environment and the municipality of San Diego de la Unión. The most credible demonstration of the model won’t be a document. It will be a community showing another community how it works. The measure isn’t how many systems get built, but how many people actually drink safe water, and who.