UNC Gillings' Water Institute, World Vision partnership will improve clean water access in 10 African nations
October 12, 2016
A six-year grant by World Vision to the University of North Carolina’s Water Institute will create a partnership to improve water, sanitation and hygiene interventions in several low- and middle-income countries, with a long-term goal of helping to solve the global water and sanitation crisis by 2030.
The partnership between The Water Institute, housed in UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, and World Vision builds on long-standing partnerships that World Vision already has established for water and sanitation programs throughout Africa.
Dr. Jamie Bartram
“World Vision and The Water Institute at UNC share two important things – a desire to make a real, substantive difference and a willingness to learn and improve,” said Water Institute Director Jamie Bartram, PhD, Don and Jennifer Holzworth Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering. “This partnership builds on those common values to deliver more impact, more sustainability and more ‘bang for the buck’ from the things World Vision is already doing well today — and to learn lessons important to implementers worldwide.”
The partnership builds upon two recent joint studies by The Water Institute and World Vision that examined the long-term functionality of wells and water points funded by the Hilton Foundation and created and maintained by World Vision. The studies established baselines for water points in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia.
Dr. Greg Allgood
“The Water Institute brings world class research capabilities, an ability to share lessons learned across the water sector so that not only World Vision but other groups can improve, and it brings the approach of monitoring, learning and evaluation, and an ability to do this work globally,” said Greg Allgood, PhD, vice president of World Vision and a UNC Gillings alumnus. “Through this effort, UNC will play a major role in helping achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal of water and sanitation for everyone by 2030. UNC is providing the major means for improvement to the NGO that is providing more clean water than any other group.”
The new studies covered by the partnership will include rigorous evaluations of World Vision’s water, sanitation and hygiene programming in the 10 countries covered in the previous studies. The studies also will provide midline (2017) and final evaluations (2020).
Future studies also will examine and assess 1) best practices for the development of water committees, which are local groups that manage water quality and the maintenance of wells and other water points within individual communities; 2) factors that contribute to the sustainability of solar-powered water systems; and 3) feasibility of adapting Continuing Quality Improvement (CQI) programs to the water and sanitation sector.
“World Vision is committed to working with our partners to provide sustainable clean water and sanitation to everyone everywhere we work, and in order to fulfill this vision, we need to improve our approach, doing some things differently and many things more efficiently,” says Dr. Allgood. “Our partnership with The Water Institute at the University of North Carolina will provide data and lessons learned allowing us to improve at an unprecedented scale.”
Share
Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: David Pesci, director of communications, (919) 962-2600 or dpesci@unc.edu
