By Bernadette Martin | Project Manager
We are pleased to share the attached 2018 annual report of World Vision’s global water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) program. It’s been a year of tremendous impact, reaching an incredible 4 million people with clean water, 2.8 million with sanitation, and 5 million with hygiene. We continue to have an industry leading effort that is reaching one new person with clean water every 10 seconds!
We remain committed to reaching everyone, everywhere we work with clean water by 2030—an ambitious but achievable goal that means reaching 50 million people between 2015 and 2030. As an interim goal—and to make sure we remain on track—we’ve committed to reach 20 million people between 2015 and 2020. This report demonstrates that we are on track to fulfill that commitment, having reached 12.7 million people with clean water in the first three years of this five-year commitment.
This has also been a year of continuing to learn and improve. We completed a 14-country evaluation of our WASH efforts in collaboration with the University of North Carolina Water Institute. This is one of the largest evaluations ever conducted of its kind, involving 35,000 households, 2,700 schools, 2,000 health care facilities, 2,500 community water points, and more than 11,000 microbial water samples. We believe that World Vision is making significant progress in providing people with access to clean water, particularly in the countries where we have invested the most including Ethiopia and Zambia. The results also showed that the entire WASH sector has room to improve in behavior change efforts to ensure water quality at the household level and improve sanitation and hygiene behaviors. That’s why, for example, we’re investing more in our work with faith leaders and other traditional leaders so that they effectively encourage habit change among their communities.
Going forward, we will continue to focus on providing effective WASH in homes, schools, and health clinics using an integrated approach that empowers local stakeholders to adopt and sustain these life-transforming behaviors and to ensure that water continues to flow.
We thank you for being part of this journey with us and for being part of this historic effort to end the global water and sanitation crisis within our lifetimes.
IMPACT STORY: SOUTHERN AFRICA
WATER IS LIFE
“Water is life” is a saying we often hear. This saying is true in Nanthowo village, where the availability of clean water has made life much easier and healthier for people living there.
As long as everyone could remember, there had never been clean water drawn from a pump in Nanthowo village in Malawi, home to 38 families. In dire need, villagers used water from unsafe sources such as open wells and rivers. Women and girls spent half the day trekking long distances to find water,
after which, they would return home to finish more chores. Girls often missed school, and women had no time for economic endeavors. Sadly, waterborne diseases, such as diarrhea, were a frequent occurrence.
“Sometimes I couldn’t even cook for my family because there was no clean water, and we couldn’t bathe or complete household chores,” explained Lusiya, a mother of five. “Worse still, we would sustain injuries trying to escape from wild animals as we searched for water.”
But all that changed, thanks to donors’ generosity and partnership with World Vision. The Malawi WASH team partnered with the community to drill a borehole in Nanthowo and equip it with a hand pump, helping the people’s dream of readily available clean water to come true. The community participated in the project by contributing sand, bricks, stone, and labor to help construct the borehole. A WASH committee was formed and trained to maintain and repair the hand pump, and manage fees that each family pays monthly to support maintenance costs.
“Life is much easier now,” said Lusiya. “We can save time, too. I have more time for farming and tending to my family, especially my children.”
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
