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October 2006
“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Earth, with its diverse and abundant life forms, including over six billion humans, is facing a serious water crisis. All the signs suggest that it is getting worse and will continue to do so, unless corrective action is taken.”
-UN World Development Report – Water for People, Water for Life
Water is not a limitless asset.
 Navigating the world of water is overwhelmingly complex and challenging. In an August 2006 speech, Professor Asit K. Biswas, recipient of the 2006 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate predicted: “The world of water will change more in the next 20 years compared to the past 2,000. We must anticipate events and not follow them.”
But the basic facts are clear. There is a limited amount of the liquid asset. In total, only three percent of the world’s water is fresh. Of that, only .5 percent is available for people. If all the earth’s water fit in a gallon jug, available fresh water would equal just over a tablespoon. (Source: Water Partners International)
Water safety and sanitation impacts business success
All businesses depend on clean water for their preservation and growth. Water for production. Water for physical plant. Water for customers. Water for employees. Water for supply chain.
In its recent publication, Business in the World of Water, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development warns, “Business cannot thrive in societies that thirst. Societies that have inadequate access to water and poor health arising from inadequate sanitation do not constitute healthy markets for business.”
But thirst is a problem of crisis proportion for over 1.1 billion people in the developing world who remain without safe, affordable and sustainable drinking water. A staggering 2.6 billion people live without adequate sanitation facilities. And the vast majority of illnesses in the developing world — 80 percent — is caused by unsafe water and inadequate sanitation.
The problem of unsafe water and poor sanitation is very much the business of business.
The Global Water Challenge
Enter the Global Water Challenge (GWC), a new initiative launched in late 2005, with significant business commitment, offering a “fresh approach” to providing safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene education in the developing world. That approach, says Dan Vermeer, director of community water partnerships at The Coca-Cola Company, who was instrumental in forming the GWC, “is one that combines strategy and coordination in a way that honors the scale of the problem.”
Vermeer, along with a core group of “water space” constituents who had been meeting together at several recent water summits, approached the UN Foundation to serve as the administrative and physical platform for the development of a new organization. The UN Foundation, started in 1998 through the philanthropic largesse of Ted Turner, is a desirable partner. It offers overall neutrality, leadership capacity, the ability to advocate, and a track record in running scalable, replicable programs. It has developed a reputation as a convener, bringing together multiple constituencies to address important global social and economic development issues.
The GWC involves the partnership of the UN Foundation with a group of multi-national corporations, government organizations, NGOs, and foundations who believe answers for solving the water and sanitation problem already exist (visit the web site for a full list of partners). Missing, however, is a collective approach to build the momentum for large scale change.
The GWC offers a new model of partnership to much more effectively deliver clean water and sanitation and hygiene education projects, build new collaborations, share best practices and raise global visibility and support. The GWC web site asserts, “Delivering these services more efficiently and widely cannot only save thousands of lives a week, but is also the essential first step in any community’s path out of poverty and disease toward more opportunity.”
The commitment of Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Dow and Cargill
Vermeer brings to the GWC his experience developing Coca-Cola’s Global Water Initiative, which he describes as a “transformative” water sustainability effort involving all functions of the Coca-Cola system across more than 200 countries. As a leader in an industry that is all about water, Coca-Cola has much at stake in its management of water in the countries and communities in which it operates. No company understands better the warning of the Pacific Institute, a sustainable development think tank, in its report “Freshwater Resources: Managing the Risks Facing the Private Sector” that “water-related risks now pose a potential multibillion-dollar threat to a wide variety of businesses and investors.”
Along with Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble (P&G) and the Wallace Genetic Foundation are founding GWC partners. Membership in the GWC is a key part of P&G’s commitment to reaching a million African children with safe drinking water and education over the next three years. The World Health Organization’s International Network to Promote Household Water Treatment and Safe Storage, which P&G helped form, has focused on establishing a scientific database of point-of-use water treatment technologies that have been shown to dramatically improve water quality and reduce disease. Now, the GWC, says Greg Allgood, director of P&G’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program, “is about implementation and advocacy. It’s broader than just household water treatment. It’s water access as well as hygiene and sanitation.”
Two other multi-nationals with large water footprints, Dow and Cargill, have joined the GWC and are providing significant time, money, and expertise. Water is a cross-cutting theme for all these companies and each has global capacity and reach.
Dow, a diversified chemical and plastics company providing products and services to customers in more than 175 countries, has annual sales of $46 billion and employs 42,000 people worldwide. Bo Miller, president and executive director of The Dow Chemical Company Foundation, says, “We’ve significantly improved our water use efficiency over the last 10 years and will continue to address our consumption of water per pound of product produced. We’ve halved the amount of waste water produced through efforts such as reusing and recycling water. Our emerging business unit – Dow Water Solutions – offers various kinds of purification and filtration technologies. We have the capability of desalinating water. So water represents not only a corporate citizenship initiative and an area for improved operational productivity, but also a business opportunity for the company. Our role in an organization like the GWC is to not only help raise awareness, but to more efficiently and effectively direct funding to areas of need in a way that’s not really been organized before.”
David Graham, Dow’s vice president of Environment, Health and Safety and the liaison to the GWC, has looked at the inventory of technologies and know-how to address the problem of safe drinking water and sanitation. “The same basic principles apply everywhere. The complexity is that there is such separation between the haves and the have-nots. There are institutional barriers that need to be overcome.”
Like others involved in the GWC, Graham believes the problem of water safety and sanitation is solvable. “Having a group of people willing to bring their own corporate expertise and move into this space of complexity with a true desire to make a difference is what I think distinguishes this group from others.”
A specific initiative benefiting the GWC and a model for future fund-raising is Dow’s support of the Blue Planet Run, an around-the-world relay planned for 2007. The run will generate worldwide awareness and money, some which will go to the GWC, to fund safe drinking water projects around the world. Blue Planet Run Foundation’s goal is to raise money and awareness to provide safe drinking water to every person on the planet.
Michelle Grogg, director of corporate contributions for Cargill, sits on the GWC’s Interim Steering Committee. As a funder, she thinks the GWC’s potential for reducing redundancies, fostering collaboration, and sharing expertise is critically important. “I think we can be more resourceful. That’s one of Cargill’s goals in joining the GWC. We were impressed by the group of people that have come together, many of whom are our current partners.”
Cargill, an international provider of food, agricultural and risk management products and services, employs 149,000 people in 63 countries. Their “Water Matters” partnership, initiated in 1995, has resulted in over 250 projects involving employees, retirees and their families in education and action in local water quality issues in Cargill communities.
Filling a gap, creating value through collaboration and research
Partners in the GWC point to a gap between small scale, “one-off” projects funded by foundations and corporations and the systemic work done by the multi-laterals. The GWC plans to leverage both the financial and nonfinancial assets of companies. Corporations can bring a range of robust capabilities at the ground level where the work must take place.
Audra Jones, senior director of partnership development at the UN Foundation, notes that “each of these companies has their own programs they could scale up. So why are they coming together to work? They see the value of working together to understand the issues and they sincerely want to move forward.”
The vision, says Coca-Cola’s Dan Vermeer, is “to get much more engaged in improving people’s lives at the local level and to do that with other partners." His experience with Coca-Cola’s Global Water Initiative drove home the point that the water issue is not uniform. “It’s very different depending what part of the world you’re in. In some places the issue is scarcity; in others it may be quality. In some places the issue is basic infrastructure development and access to safe water and in others it’s regulatory cost pressure.”
Echoing the same theme, Cargill’s Grogg believes that “in order to make a sustainable difference, it is necessary to get down to the local level to understand the needs and circumstances.”
Piloting a “Water for Schools” program to grow throughout Kenya
The GWC is testing its viability with a pilot program in Kenya that is intended to create a template for how future projects can be promoted and increased in scale. The “Water for Schools” program will build upon a smaller, successful initiative supported by Coca-Cola and implemented by CARE and the Water Millennium Water Alliance.
The goal of the next phase is to bring safe water, hygiene education, and sanitation to schools and clinics in Kenya’s Nyanza province. With established relationships with government officials, the involvement of local and international NGOs with in-country water/sanitation project experience and the collaborative corporate funding GWC will provide, the work can be scaled up significantly. Building on the point-of-use treatment, safe storage, and hygiene education components of the program, selective introduction of latrines and community water access points will be introduced.
In some of the schools in sub-Saharan Africa, the children have to drink water that is essentially liquid mud. Says P&G’s Allgood, “We have a specific technology — PUR® Purifier of Water — that removes the dirt or mud from the water turbidity, as well as the pathogenic parasites, bacteria, and viruses. In Kenya, CARE is working to target schools where our technology can be used. We will provide the funding to supply the product at no cost.”
As this effort grows, the plan is for this initiative to be complemented by an applied research agenda conducted by the Emory Center for Global Safe Water and other partners – often lacking in water and sanitation efforts – that will provide evaluation and identify components of success. In the end the hope is to use what is learned and to work closely with the Kenyan government to move the program beyond the first three to five years of direct support and bring it to thousands of schools in the rest of the country and beyond.
For an initiative that is only nine months in the making there is considerable momentum. A strategic analysis of the water landscape will soon be underway, the initiative will be bringing an executive director on board and there will be new stakeholders engaged. Says Jones: “The idea is for GWC to become a resource to organizations looking to fund and looking to receive funding — a broker role — looking to research, evaluate and monitor programs and to share best practice information. The more inclusive the better.”
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