People can’t change the world, change their community, or even go to school if they spend vast amounts of time walking back and forth to distant, muddy holes carrying up to 40 pounds of water. Water For People is dedicated to helping create the water and sanitation foundations that will allow people to gain control of their lives and futures. Our goal is to maximize people’s potential to meet their development challenges through creative water and sanitation investments.
By engaging partners within the government, private sector, and municipalities, we are seeing this goal materialize. In Cuchumuela, Bolivia, children are attending school well past the previous norm of fourth grade, largely because they spend less time carrying water. In the South 24 Parganas District of West Bengal, India, families are successfully investing in latrines for their homes through a revolving loan program with local partners, and the program is already funding itself without any additional capital.
At the foundation of it all is our belief that “Everyone” in the districts and municipalities where we work must be supported—rich and poor, easy to reach and hard to reach, politically connected and politically isolated. By committing now to “Everyone,” we can generate real change. No child should be burdened by carrying water instead of books. And no solution should fail because the work isn’t monitored –which means that no water project should be deemed “complete” just because water flows on the first day of installation. When we commit to “Everyone” in the districts and municipalities where we work, we are developing a program that keeps water flowing for every family, every school, and every clinic. Forever. To get there, we monitor the outcomes of our projects for at least 10 years to ensure everything is working properly— with the ultimate goal that communities, governments, and the local private sector will not need us, or any other nonprofit organization, for their water and sanitation challenges in the future.
We simply cannot help some people in the districts where we work and not others. Success means that water flows for everyone and latrines are used by all.
To reach the goal of Everyone, we believe that every organization working to support increased access to safe water should be able to answer each of these questions with a resounding YES.
- Does your program include strategies that will help to ensure that Everyone in the area will have access to water, not just the easiest to reach?
- Will the people who get water today still have it in 10, 20, 30 years?
- Are the local government, community organizations, local businesses and community members contributing sufficient funds so that the water system can be repaired and replaced over time without additional donor funding?
- Is the organization committed to monitoring that work for at least 10 years?
