Clean water for 1 new person every 10 seconds

Thanks to the faithfulness of our donors and partners, and the hard work of more than 1,200 World Vision staff members, we remain on track to reach everyone, everywhere we work, with clean water access by 2030, some 50 million people. Only six years into our 15-year commitment, we have reached 22.5 million people.

Our five-year business plan continues to guide our global water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programming, which enables us to transform the lives of millions of people through four strategic goals: accelerating access to equitable WASH services; deepening our focus on the most vulnerable people; demonstrating sustainable impact; and leveraging business plan investments to raise additional funds. Through this business plan, we are committed to reaching 35 million people with clean water between 2016 and 2025. We are on track to do this.

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, our efforts have made strong impact, allowing us to meet or slightly exceed our targets by reaching 3 million people with clean water, 2.4 million people with improved sanitation, and 3.6 million people with handwashing facilities.

In line with our business plan commitment to deepen our focus on the most vulnerable, more than 84% of participants live in fragile or extremely fragile contexts. Because of several humanitarian situations that included civil war, we exceeded our targets by providing emergency water to more than 430,000 people and emergency hygiene supplies to more than 800,000 people.

Thanks to the support of our donors, World Vision continues to reach one new person with clean water every 10 seconds.

Faith leaders serve as influencers in their communities. We partnered with them in promoting healthy WASH behaviors, training 8,763 faith leaders (164% of our target). As part of our five-year business plan, we forecast a large increase to 70% of water points being household taps and only 3% hand pumps. However, during this first year, we exceeded this target, with 78% of community water points as household taps and 2% hand pumps, which will result in significant time savings, particularly for women and children.

We have new measures to track our progress in gender equity. For example, we now track the number of women who are employed in businesses related to the WASH services being provided to households as well as trained in advocacy to ensure
their needs are met. During this reporting period, 1,624 women became active in WASH businesses, including business centers
selling hygiene supplies, water filters, soap, handwashing stations, and latrines, and more than 4,000 women completed advocacy training, which helps ensure long-term sustainability of our work.

There was only one area where we did not meet or exceed our targets: the number of children reached with safer drinking water at schools (77% of target). This target was missed primarily due to a delay in funding for schools in Ethiopia, which caused an  underachievement. However, the work in Ethiopia is now moving forward.

A silver lining in the global COVID-19 pandemic has been the accelerated effort to improve hygiene to prevent the spread of the virus. Thanks to years of donor support, World Vision is wellpositioned to take advantage of this opportunity. We reached nearly double our target for handwashing facilities in schools (5,770) and in healthcare facilities (1,533). We also completed our three-year commitment (2019-2021) to reach 800 rural healthcare facilities with water on premises and comprehensive WASH services by reaching 1,460 clinics with water, 1,117 with sanitation, and 4,559 with handwashing facilities. Based on this remarkable success, we are now committing to reach 2,000 healthcare facilities with clean water between FY19 and FY23, serving approximately 18 million people.

Finishing the Job Progress
During FY21, we launched plans to finish the job of providing basic clean water access to everyone, everywhere we work in Honduras and Zambia, building on our success in Rwanda. In Rwanda, we reached 613,601 people with access to clean water toward our goal of 1 million people, and we are on track to finish the job in 2023.

Thanks to donor support and a big influx of funds from other sources, including UNICEF and child sponsorship funds, Zambia
reached 213,274 people with clean water—27% of our five-year goal to finish the job by reaching 800,000 people. We’ll need to
increase funding from U.S. donors to Zambia to maintain this level of impact. In Honduras, we are building the team needed to reach 650,000 people with clean water and finish the job by 2027. This will mean reaching more than half of Hondurans without clean water in the rural areas of the entire country.

We are very grateful to our donor partners for being part of this impact.

Photo Captions

(1) A permanent handwashing station was constructed at Kibirizi primary school in Rwanda. Students are now able to wash their hands before and after eating as well as after using the latrine. “I thank World Vision for supporting our school and the entire community,” says Celine, a student (not pictured).

(2) Harsh climate conditions and civil conflict in their Somali village of Buulo-Cir forced Hawaa (pictured), 25, and her family to move to the Tawakal Camp for internally displaced people in Baidoa. Conditions in the camp were not much better, as they had no easy access to clean water—until World Vision built a water system connecting the camp to a water source 1.25 miles away.
“We could not believe our ears when we heard from the camp leader that World Vision was planning to extend the water supply,” says Hawaa. That extension not only brought water closer to home for camp residents, it also provided paying jobs to camp youth, who helped lay pipe and dig latrine pits.

 For more details on our work in 2021, please see the attached report

• Global Water Fund FY21 Report (PDF)