A Fresh Look at Water

As the water-project coordinator at an international adoption charity, Eric Stowe saw hundreds of

“horribly ill” children. Most of them were sickened by the unclean water they drank.

Mr. Stowe, who had the task of purifying water in their orphanages, realized more children needed his help. So last year he founded A Child’s Right, in Tacoma, Wash., a charity that works overseas to provide clean water not only for orphans but also for children rescued from the sex trade and those who live in urban shelters.

Thus far Mr. Stowe has raised $150,000 for projects in China, Nepal, and five other countries and has recruited a cadre of trained volunteers to put systems in place so children won’t get sick from quenching their thirst.

“A lack of clean water,” he says, “is the biggest hindrance to safe development for these kids.”

Mr. Stowe joins a growing number of charities and donors who seek to improve access to clean water and sanitation, as well as promote hygiene education overseas.

International relief charities are now collaborating with environmental and health groups to tackle the problem, and they are attracting increased support from donors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which recently made a series of grants committing $63.3-million to the cause.

Water and philanthropy also captured center stage as the topic of a July meeting of several dozen wealthy philanthropists, and some charities have set ambitious fund-raising goals for water projects, including Global Water Challenge, a nonprofit group in Washington formed last year that hopes to raise $20-million next year, mainly by tapping corporations.

High Failure Rates

Despite the growing interest in water issues among private donors, charity leaders say they still face an uphill struggle to meet all the needs. They say the issue has been a problem for such a long time that donors do not see an urgency. Plus, they must confront other challenges, like the complexity of dealing with water issues, the high failure rate of past water projects, and the ability of other international causes, such as AIDS, to more effectively place themselves on donors’ radar screens.

“Water has been left behind,” says Paul Faeth, executive director of Global Water Challenge, a group of corporations, foundations, and charities that seek to find solutions to the problem and spread them around the world. “The message around water and sanitation is quite complicated and is not quite dinner talk. It’s not very sexy.”

Dirty Water

The problem is vast: An estimated one billion people live without clean water, and 2.6 billion people lack sanitation facilities, according to the World Health Organization, in Geneva.

In some countries, available water sources contain dangerously high levels of arsenic or fluoride, which cause grave illnesses.

In other places where potable water is not readily available, people, mostly women, must walk for miles to fetch water, only to have it shared by livestock, dirtied by excrement, and contaminated with diseases, many of which cause diarrhea, which kills 1.8 million children each year, according to the World Health Organization.

In addition to the serious health risks afforded by such water, the women’s laborious journey keeps daughters out of school and mothers unable to tend to other family needs or earn income.

“If you are interested in any other human-development agenda — education, health, livelihoods — people need water, and they are getting it from polluted sources, which are making them ill,” says Patricia Dandonoli, president of WaterAid America, in New York, which opened its doors four years ago. “It’s a tremendous drain on the developing world’s ability to escape poverty.”

At a United Nations summit in 2000, in an effort to draw global attention to solving the problem, 189 countries adopted a pledge to reduce by half the number of people who don’t have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Halfway to the finish line in 2015, a report by Unicef, in New York, says water efforts are on track to reach the goal. But a separate report by the United Nations said that reaching the sanitation quota will “require extraordinary efforts.”

The U.S. government has also begun to show more interest in promoting clean water and sanitation in other countries.

In 2005 President Bush signed into law the Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. A bill to provide $300-million in the coming year for overseas water projects authorized by that law is now pending in Congress.

‘It Is in Vogue Now’

Until recently the budgets of most charities that focus solely on the entwined issues of water, sanitation, and hygiene education were relatively modest, and only one grant maker, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, in Los Angeles, made significant grants to those efforts, including $18-million in grants to support water projects in West Africa.

“We were pretty much a loner out there for quite a while,” says Edmund J. Cain, vice president for grant programs at the foundation, which has distributed $62.8-million for water projects since 1990. “It is in vogue now, and the reason it is in vogue is that some foundations dealing with health issues for a long part of their time are beginning to recognize you can’t effectively deal with health unless you deal with water.”

The Gates foundation has so far made eight grants focused on water, part of its exploratory effort to decide whether the topic should become a grant-making priority for the foundation.

PATH, an international health charity in Seattle, received the largest grant, $17-million, to develop and find ways to commercially distribute household water-treatment products. But the award sparked some criticism by water advocates who believe dollars are better spent improving ready access to safe water.

“They are missing the boat,” says Marla Smith-Nilson, founder of Water 1st International, in Seattle. “When you are looking at poverty and ways to eliminate it, you have got to limit women’s walk to get water. “

Glenn Austin, a spokesman for PATH, says each approach has validity.

“I don’t pretend in any way that we are working on the most important part of the water problem,” he says. “But I also don’t think you can say any one facet is sufficient in and of itself to form a solution.”

Indeed, charities are trying a range of approaches to tackle water problems. Many groups work with local charities overseas, and also request participation from residents, to dig wells or boreholes to gain access to underground springs, construct piping systems to transport clean ground water from hilltops above towns, or build rainwater catchment tanks.

Other methods include installing filtering devices in homes and schools or cleaning pipes that deliver water, which may be contaminated by arsenic or fluoride.

In an effort to draw attention to the technology solutions now available for charities and others, the Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, last month unveiled a new Web site (http://drinking-water.org) that surveys the range of solutions worldwide. The Web site, available in five languages, was paid for by a $636,900 grant from the Global Health and Education Foundation, in Danville, Calif., which was started by the philanthropist Kenneth E. Behring.

‘No Simple Answer’

“If we can go to the moon, we can give people pure water that doesn’t kill them or cripple them,” says Mr. Behring, who estimates he has donated $7-million to $8-million to water projects in China and Mexico in the past several years. “There’s no simple answer, and it’s going to take many companies and organizations.”

Efforts to ease access to clean water will not succeed without also tackling sanitation and hygiene education, says Clarissa Brocklehurst, chief of the water, environment, and sanitation section at Unicef, which spent $260-million last year on its water, sanitation, and hygiene projects.

“There’s a growing recognition that you have to have a combination of things — there’s no one single magic bullet,” she says.

Fund-Raising Gains

As water issues gain more visibility, charities say they are achieving new fund-raising successes.

WaterPartners International, in Kansas City, Mo., tripled its budget to $3-million in the past two years largely because of a $1-million award from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, in Austin, Tex., and a $4-million four-year grant from the Agora Foundation, in Mountain View, Calif.

The grants partly helped support the group’s program to offer small loans to people and to villages that wish to pay for their own water and sanitation projects. Since 2004, WaterPartners has lent $1-million, including small amounts to individuals in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to connect their homes to the city municipal water system, and $20,000 to a community in Kenya to build a well and install pipes.

Repayment of loans has been better in some places than others, and the group is conducting research on ways to increase the program’s scope, says Steven J. Byers, the group’s director of development and communications.

Since loans are a renewable pot of money, the group’s leaders hope the loan program can reach more people than grants, although WaterPartners plans to continue to make grants to local water groups as well, says Mr. Byers.

“There are a lot more people who need water than we are ever going to get to unless we change the paradigm, and water credit is an attempt to that,” he says. “This takes a bigger view than building the next well.”

Support for water causes is pouring in from other areas as well.

The African Well Fund, a grass-roots group started in 2002 by fans of the rock musician Bono, has raised $390,000 for water projects run by Africare, in Washington. The rock band the Police is donating tickets from each show on its current global tour of nearly 100 dates to WaterAid America, which has auctioned them for as much as $3,000 apiece.

The creators of the documentary film Running the Sahara, about three men who run across the Sahara Desert, also formed the H2O Africa Foundation, in Zionsville, Ind., in January, which has so far raised $550,000 for water projects in five countries.

Money from corporations is also on the rise, with the Starbucks Foundation, in Seattle, promising at least $10-million in grants and the P&G Fund, in Cincinnati, the charitable arm of Procter & Gamble, pledging to bring its total contributions to clean water overseas to $7.5-million by next year.

Proving Results

Still, much more support is needed, says David Douglas, who founded Water Advocates, in Washington, in 2005 to garner attention and donations for groups promoting clean water and sanitation. “Americans take water for granted,” says Mr. Douglas. “We don’t know people suffering from cholera or trachoma. We don’t have babies dying of diarrheal dehydration.”

Mr. Douglas and his family’s philanthropy, the Wallace Genetic Foundation, in Washington, are footing a large part of Water Advocates’ $500,000 annual budget, some of which is used to organize meetings for groups that deal with water issues to forge partnerships and avoid overlap.

While efforts like Water Advocates may help, water charities will not win big increases in donations unless they do a better job of proving to donors how their projects are making a long-term difference in people’s lives, says Mr. Cain of the Hilton Foundation.

“What you are really looking at is reducing infant mortality, trachoma, guinea worm, and diarrheal diseases,” he says. “Monitoring those outcomes is a heck of a lot more difficult than measuring the number of wet wells and pumps.”

Christine L. Moe, an associate professor of global health at Emory University, in Atlanta, agrees with Mr. Cain’s assessment. In 2004 the university created the Center for Global Safe Water, which works to educate students about evaluating water quality and conduct research on the results of water projects.

“We are bringing some more rigorous science into this field,” says Ms. Moe, the center’s sanitation director. An Emory professor affiliated with the center is collecting data in western Kenya on one effort to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene at local schools, supported by a $9.5-million grant from the Gates foundation.

The Hilton foundation is also supporting the Millennium Water Alliance, an effort to promote collaboration among charities carrying out water projects.

Designed by Malcolm S. Morris, a businessman, the alliance pulls together nine charities working in Ethiopia and Kenya. The group has adopted common standards, technology, and training methods, and alliance members select staff members from member charities to represent them with local authorities. Members from each charity also meet to assess progress, seek advice for problems that may arise, and exchange ideas about projects.

Mr. Morris says the group has parlayed $2-million from the United States Agency for International Development and other government agencies into $35-million, $5-million of which comes from government grants and the rest from private support. The group hopes soon to expand to one country per year, says Mr. Morris.

The arrangement has been a boon for charities working in Ethiopia and Kenya. “We probably have a bigger voice and more influence than we would have if we were working as individual NGO’s,” says Peter Lochery, director of the water team at CARE, in Atlanta, and vice president of the alliance. “We’ve been able to go look at what our colleagues in different NGO’s are doing. That hasn’t happened to the same extent in the past.”

Lofty Goals

The alliance, which hopes to reach 500 million people by 2015, isn’t the only water group with lofty expansion goals. By 2011, Water Missions International, in Charleston, S.C., hopes to help 100 million people gain access to clean water and sanitation.

“Right now we are close to a million. We are so far off that curve,” says Molly Greene, who along with her husband, George, sold their engineering company in 2001 to start the charity.

But in March the group announced its largest gift to date, a $4.6-million grant from the Pentair Foundation in Golden Valley, Minn., for a project in Colon, Honduras, that hopes to help 220,000 people there. The group has also hired its first development director, to seek more support.

The Greenes started the charity after designing and sending drinking-water-treatment equipment to Honduras following the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch there. “We really wanted to do something in our lives that was very significant,” says Ms. Greene. “What is more significant than giving someone a glass of clean water?”