Author: danone

Impact Water provides safe drinking water solutions by delivering, installing and maintaining  water treatment systems at ultra-affordable prices to schools across Africa. They designed a cheap, user-friendly water treatment device, which is sold directly to schools. Impact Water works with more than 20 000 schools in Nigeria, where children can re-fill their bottles with safe drinking water all day long. Impact Water is also present in Uganda and Kenya.

Around the world schools are looking for safe water solutions but often need assistance to obtain them.  Cost, availability and ability to maintain are all major obstacles.  By leveraging blended finance and partnering with impact investors that value health, education and environmental benefits, Impact Water is able to provide sponsored systems (free or close to it) to the most disadvantaged schools (the majority of the developing-country school market) while also selling to those that can afford to purchase. 

Strong partnerships with the Nigerian Government (Federal and State-level) are essential, as is a long-term commitment to each school. 

In 2010, Randy Welsch, an American investor and businessman and his son Galen, a former Peace Corps member, founded Jibu to create meaningful economic opportunities for entrepreneurs as well as affordable access to safe water for people. This is how they came with the idea of developing a network of franchisees selling Jibu water.

Jibu (Swahili word for “solution”) started to open the first water kioks in Rwanda and Uganda at the same time with the vision to prove the replicability of the model. Today Jibu operates in 8 countries, expanding its franchise model in East Africa, and launched 154 franchises.

India as a nation ranks 120 out of 122 countries for its water quality and has the largest number of people without access to safe drinking water globally, at 75.8 million people.

Naandi Community Water Services (NCWS) is one of India’s largest social enterprises established in 2010; working with a mission to improve lives of the underserved communities by providing access to safe drinking water in a sustainable manner. They do this by setting up decentralized community water centers in regions where the existing sources of drinking water are contaminated (with chemical and microbial contaminants) and unfit for consumption.

NCWS core belief is that successful community mobilization is central to sustainable safe water projects; accordingly the organizations approach emphasizes participatory community involvement through the development of local capacity in managing and delivering self-sustainable services. The model is based on a tripartite partnership between a local community, a donor and NCWS. NCWS manages this partnership from the selection of the location, procuring the equipment, ensuring quality, awareness building, community engagement, driving behavior change, to training community resources to operate and manage the water center and monitoring.

So far, NCWS has reached out to over 640 communities across 7 states in India, impacting the lives of over 750,000 people.

The burden of waterborne diseases among children in India is one of the highest globally. In order to safeguard the health of the children and make them the agents of change in the community, NCWS, under its School Water Program ensures free access to safe drinking water and hygiene education to children at schools and crèche centers in the communities it operates. NCWS has reached out to about 50,000 children as part of its School Water Program in 2019.

Oshun was created as an initiative from 3 French companies, including the Société du Canal de Provence, to address the issue of safe drinking water in the Sahel.

In Senegal, a big portion of the population is still facing challenges in accessing safe drinking water, including unequal access to potable water and sanitation services.

Oshun provides a small, easy-to-run and designed-in-house water treatment system that is installed in a kiosk, treating water from the nearby water drill. This kiosk is run by a local entrepreneur, usually female, who sells the water to local communities at an affordable price. They currently run 45 water kiosks equipped with a range of autonomous water treatments and plan to continue expanding in the Sahel.