Charity: Water seeks to solve the clean water crisis by working with local organizations to support safe drinking water programs in the developing world. They stress the importance of transparency in their work in order to attract donations, relying on technology to monitor results in real time. Charity: Water separates the humanitarian and operational sides of their organization to ensure accountability and transparency of the use of funds. Overhead costs are funded by multi-year agreements with private donors/investors and brand partners. A group of 13 business leaders contribute shares of their own companies into a common investment fund, which is liquidated from time to time to cover operating costs and finance an employee bonus scheme. Through these practices, Charity: Water moves the burden of operational costs to corporate contributors and commits 100% of all crowdfunding and other public donations solely towards programmatic efforts on the ground.

Theory of Change

Providing clean and safe running water, especially in rural areas, helps promote good health and hygiene, support economic and food security, enable children to attend school, and alleviate gendered water-sourcing burdens.

Activities

To raise money for initiatives with community partners, Charity: Water obtains monthly donations from 44,000 individuals – who have raised over $US 21.6 million for water programs. They also received corporate sponsorship for around 6,000 programs in 14 countries and held 3,400 public fundraisers run by volunteers in the US and UK. Charity: Water has also worked with field partners to fund the construction, monitoring and evaluation, and maintenance of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs. Charity: Water has also developed data-driven automatic sensors to measure well water source flow and productivity to quickly respond to broken water systems.

Results

To date, Charity: Water has funded 56,759 water projects, serving over 12 million people across 29 countries in the Global South. The running water systems they have helped provide have saved 11 billion miles of walking and almost 12 years’ worth of time previously spent on collecting water across Africa and Asia.