Hilton Foundation grants $1.5M to Water Institute at UNC to evaluate its water initiatives

Dr. Jamie Bartram

“The Hilton Foundation is one of the biggest players in the world when it comes to drinking water safety and accessibility in developing countries,” said Jamie Bartram, PhD, Water Institute director and professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the UNC public health school. “The foundation has asked us to work with their grantees as well as with other key community, government and nonprofit stakeholders in the water sector. This is a fantastic opportunity for us to work alongside the foundation and the projects they support to improve their strategy and ultimately make an impact on the whole water sector.”

“Central to the Foundation’s Safe Water Strategy is rigorous monitoring and evaluation to improve the overall effectiveness of our grantmaking,” said Braimah Apambire, Senior Advisor for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at the Foundation. A very important part of this project will be providing feedback to inform ongoing programming. The University of North Carolina’s Water Institute has established itself as a leader in the WASH sector, with deep, substantive expertise, demonstrated experience in conducting complex evaluations, and the capacity to effectively aggregate and disseminate learnings and findings. We look forward to working with the Institute and grantees to evaluate and improve our own grantmaking as well as foster partnerships and cross-learning throughout the sector.”

Through this partnership, the Water Institute will help foundation grantees develop their own internal monitoring systems by training them to use and report data based on a set of agreed indicators. The training will occur through face-to-face meetings as well as distance-learning programs pioneered at UNC. Water Institute representatives also will visit a selection of grantee water projects across the globe to gather more details about the progress, successes and learning needs of each grantee.

The team will create flexible, customized learning plans for every grantee, which will be delivered through a Virtual Learning Center (VLC) that will bring the Foundation, its grantees and other stakeholders together for learning, feedback, quality improvement and in-depth practice discussions. In addition to delivering distance learning, the VLC aims to keep grantees up-to-date on new developments within the Hilton Foundation-UNC partnership and will be a vehicle for rapid, efficient dissemination of findings.

The framework for reporting progress and successes is already in place. The team will gather a clear picture of how each grantee project is proceeding by comparing perceptions from the grantees and beneficiaries. This data will be compiled into a set of benchmarks for use by all grantees and presented annually to the Hilton Foundation.

It was the foundation’s long history of improving water conditions in the world’s disadvantaged communities that sparked the Water Institute’s interest in a partnership, said Bobbi Wallace, MPH, director of corporate, foundation and global partnerships at UNC’s public health school. “The Water Institute and the Gillings School of Global Public Health have put together a team with world-class skills in monitoring, evaluation and learning for the Hilton Foundation grant,” Wallace said. “We’re pleased and honored to be working with the Foundation and their grantees to evaluate their programs worldwide, and we expect the work of the team to result in important learning for project participants and lessons that can be applied more broadly across global water programs.”

The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation was created in 1944 by international business pioneer Conrad N. Hilton, who founded Hilton Hotels and left his fortune to help the world’s disadvantaged and vulnerable people. The Foundation currently conducts strategic initiatives in six priority areas: providing safe water, ending chronic homelessness, preventing substance abuse, helping children affected by HIV/AIDS, supporting transition-age youth in foster care, and extending Conrad Hilton’s support for the work of Catholic Sisters. Following selection by an independent international jury, the Foundation annually awards the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize to a nonprofit organization doing extraordinary work to reduce human suffering. From its inception, the Foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants, distributing $82 million in the U.S. and around the world in 2011. The Foundation’s current assets are approximately $2 billion. For more information, please visit www.hiltonfoundation.org.

The Water Institute at UNC, launched in October 2010, aims to collaborate with individuals and institutions from diverse disciplines and sectors and empower them to solve the most critical global issues in water and health. The Institute’s annual October Water and Health Conference, co-presented with UNC’s Institute for the Environment, brings together more than 450 delegates from more than 30 countries to study drinking water supply, sanitation, hygiene and water resources in developing and developed countries.

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