Good News: We’re asking new questions about clean water

For many of us, data collection is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives — think of how many times you’ve had to accept or reject cookies today alone. By contrast, our local partners work in some of the world’s hardest-to-reach communities. These places aren't just water-scarce, they're also data-scarce. Reliable data is largely nonexistent. 

That means our partners need to manually collect data — community by community, household by household, water point by water point. Often, we’re looking at data that directly relates to the effectiveness of our solutions: Did bacteria levels decrease? Did school attendance increase? How much time is saved per trip to collect water?

They’re all valuable questions with incredibly valuable answers. But there’s a new set of questions we’ve begun to ask that reveal a deeper level of insight, focusing on one core issue: How does water insecurity feel?

Together with our local partner in Nepal, we used a new set of innovative tools to assess the 12 most common experiences associated with a lack of access to clean water — things like anger, shame, and worry. We collected data before and after implementing clean water projects and the results were truly astonishing. We’ve never had data like this before. 

Ending the water crisis means striving to provide relief for the 703 million people living without clean water — but it also means ensuring that the 18 million people we’ve served so far continue to experience the joy of life with water. 

It’s all important — and you help make all of it possible. Thank you.