Hey friends, I’m back to fill you in on seriously exciting news in the water space and to give you a few drivers’ seat thoughts about the innovator, Water.org’s game changing program – WaterCredit.
Last week on October 27th PepsiCo Foundation announced the largest grant in its 50 year history: an $8 million grant to Water.org to expand access to safe water and sanitation in India. That’s a big number folks – it represents a major moment in a movement to bring the water crisis a really effective solution – a great new, innovative tool that, according to Matt Damon co-founder of Water.org, really can change the course of poverty. Over the next five years, this funding will bring 800,000 people in rural villages and city slums across India household water piping, faucets and toilets. This is what they desperately want and need, and now, more importantly, are able to pay for with a WaterCredit micro loan of around $125.
Sarah Skidmore of the Associated Press highlighted in her article a very salient linkage for PepsiCo and Water.org’s shared commitment. Simplified: business can play a strategic catalytic role alongside civil society and government departments to reduce longstanding socially rooted challenges. Water being one of the most critical challenges of our time across our globe.
Early in 2007, the proverbial light went off for me – the moment of my epiphany about water – it was in India on a due diligence trip for PepsiCo Foundation with Water.org co-founder and CEO, Gary White. For me it was a fact finding mission, a moveable learning lab that brought me into a world I never knew coming from the Northeast of the US where water is so abundant and the landscape verdant. Gary introduced me to mothers and their enthusiastic playful children, local elder panchayat members who are village leaders. We traveled through handfuls of slums across Bangalore, Hyderabad, and villages in the state of Tamil Nadu to learn about a small microfinance pilot program Water.org was testing called WaterCredit.
As a grantmaker, I needed to see it all first hand, meet the lending groups and loan recipients and really get up close with the issue and understand what life is like for folks who don’t have enough water to even bathe once a month. Nearly overnight I got it – I saw with my own eyes how one small $100 loan becomes a modern miracle to a family. That loan brings water connections right in their homes; it transforms their everyday, bringing hope and often a better economic footing for the family. For one family in southern Tamil Nadu, a loan meant a long hoped-for business could be launched.
I’ll never forget Geetha a young beautiful mother of two adolescent girls and a seven-year-old boy. Her husband was seriously ill, which made him unable to work and provide for the family, so it was up to Geetha to eke out a living. She was a good cook and wanted to start up a catering business. With the water she fetched at her neighborhood standpipe twice a week, she was only able to keep around eight or nine pots of water. It wasn’t enough water to cook the amount of food to start a catering business while also being able to provide the needed water for her family’s daily cooking, cleaning and bathing needs. That’s where the WaterCredit loan comes in to save the day. Geetha could afford to pay for her $100 water connection loan repaying it in small amounts over the course of a year. In fact, and here’s a morsel of the brilliance of WaterCredit, the cost of the loan turned out to be less than she was paying to occasionally buy water from a high-price water tanker that would come to the village to bridge what was infrequently provided at the public pipe. This, I saw, was everyone’s challenge: getting enough water every day to meets their needs.
WaterCredit is making a huge change in how the everyday family can take charge of their lives and not have to wait years and years for a water system to be installed by local authorities. One small microloan becomes a ticket to a future. For Geetha’s oldest daughter it meant that she could enroll in 9th grade and commit to a high school education because she was freed up from the weekly task of fetching water for her mother every other day. And with the extra money her mother earned from catering she could buy her required school books and uniforms.
PepsiCo and Water.org are developing a commercial marketplace for microloans for water connections and toilets. This innovation is game changing for small villages and city slums across India. Water is fundamental; it unleashes the chains binding families in poverty.
Find out more about how it works at www.watercredit.org.
