This was until her father met Steele in the US and suggested the American link up with his Kenyan family and help carry out his plan to bring clean water to arid or semi-arid parts of Kenya.

“I have been constructing affordable housing in the States for many years. So when I began working on a sustainable development project in Tanzania and realised how severe the problem of access to clean water is in Africa, I felt I wanted to see if I could do something about it,” Mr Steele told the Business Daily.

Eugenia was working part time when she and her brothers escorted Steele around the country in search of the community that he found “most in need” and logistically most convenient, given that his American work schedule did not allow him to stay in Kenya full-time.

After a month of traveling around rural areas, Steele finally settled on Magadi sub-county where he found access to clean water was a critical problem while the Maasai women living there were “the most underserved of the underserved”.

They were the type of people he wanted to assist and this is where Ms Konya’s help mattered most.

“I needed to have someone on the ground who I could trust and who I felt had the capacity to work with the women,” said Steele, adding that he has not been disappointed with his decision to give Ms Konya the job of site manager of Maji Masafi, an NGO they formed.

Mr Steele and Ms Konya held meetings with the area chief, the community development officer to and officials at Tata Chemicals. They also met rural women living in the five villages situated inside the Oldonyo Nyokie group ranch which stretches from Lake Magadi north to a military base.

The women were all illiterate and very few spoke Swahili, making Ms Konya’s first task of organising women into five women groups (through which they could articulate their problems in accessing clean water) a tough ask.

“Tata had signed a deal with Maji Masafi to provide 10,000 litres of water to the villages every week, but after Steele left for the US (to fundraise for the new NGO), deliveries tapered off,” says Ms Konya.

This event made Mr Steele and Ms Konya realise that the women would ultimately need to become self-reliant if they were to adequately tackle their water problem through the Maji Masafi initiative.

So in 2013, while Mr Steele was busy raising $15,000 (Sh1.5 million) in the US to buy five plastic 10,000-litre water tanks, Ms Konya was trying to come up with short-term solutions in the five villages.

“We realised we would eventually need to own a lorry of our own, but in the meantime we had to rent a water truck which brought water to all five villages once a week,” said Ms Konya, who trained the women to manage the weekly distribution and sale of water.

The women were so successful in handling the cash that Ms Konya and Mr Steele brought in a financial consultant to help them start ‘chamas’ (micro-finance projects) so that they could both save and lend out money among themselves.