The H2O For Life Campaign at The Haverford School in Haverford Pennsylvania has official closed. With the support of the entire Haverford community, the second grade team raised $7,628.50 for Kimeji Primary School in Tanzania.

 
The campaign was kicked off for H2O on World Water Day with a Drop in the Bucket Brigade. The second grade boys lined the walkway as our Middle and Upper School Divisions passed through our gauntlet dropping in coins to help “Make a Change” in the lives of their peers in Africa. Afterward, they visited the classrooms in the Lower School to collect any coins that the Lower School community brought in to support the efforts. The boys took their buckets back to the classrooms and sorted and counted the money in teams. They raised over $700 in one half hour, but as importantly they raised awareness of the global need for clean water throughout the Haverford Community.
     
The boys took their responsibility as global citizens seriously and participated in their own ways. Then on April 20th, 2012, the entire second grade team laced up their sneakers and each team member grabbed two gallon jugs full of water and headed to Sabol Field, our school track, to walk in the shoes of the children from Kimeji Primary and all children who have to walk for a clean drink of water. Later that evening the Haverford Community was invited to attend a Bingo Night hosted by the combined efforts of The Haverford Upper School Service Learning Team and Agnes Irwin, our sister school. $1,140 of our total was raised in that joint effort and generously donated to the second grade class for our Walk for Water Campaign.
      
They not only reached their goal of $5,000 but surpassed it!

Thank you The Haverford School! Keep up the good work!

On World Water Day, The Coca-Cola Company and the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation announced the dedication of $6 million in 2011 to water and sanitation partnerships aimed at improving the lives of an estimated 250,000 African women and girls.  Jeff Seabright, Vice President for Environment and Water Resources for The Coca-Cola Company, announced the commitment as part of a high-level leadership event that featured the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding on global water issues by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and World Bank President Robert Zoellick.

This commitment is part of the Replenish Africa Initiative (RAIN), a program to provide 2 million people with access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015. 

Providing access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene is critical for creating healthy communities around the world. The World Health Organization estimates that African women and children spend up to 40 billion hours collecting water each year; time that could otherwise be spent learning, working or caring for their families. Because of the distance many women are required to travel to retrieve clean water, they often resort to using unsafe surface water sources, putting themselves and their families at risk of life-threatening diseases. Additionally, data from the United Nations show that a child dies every 15 seconds on average from the diarrheal and malnutrition impacts related to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation or insufficient hygiene.

Click here to read the full press release.  To learn more about RAIN, visit the RAIN Website.

Water champions from around the globe joined forces to explore how water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) education can be made sustainable through the incorporation of basic human values in a workshop sponsored by Project WET and UN-Habitat on March 20^th in Cape Town.

A lead-in event to international observances of World Water Day, the Human-Values-Based Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Education: Best Practices for Sustainable Programs seminar featured interactive discussions, the participation of an internationally acclaimed musical artist and a township visit for its 20 participants.

The goal of the seminar was to introduce the concept of human-values-based WASH education, share experiences and success stories around WASH education and discuss best practices for promoting both sustainable WASH projects and water and ethics in the urban setting. John Etgen from the Project WET Foundation served as moderator for the event’s key speakers: Dr. Art-Ong Jumsai from the Water Institute in Thailand, Andre Dzikus from UN HABITAT, Sagie Naike of the Africa Institute of Sathya SAI Education in Zambia, Julia Nelson from the Project WET Foundation and Teddy Tindamanyire from the Uganda Ministry of Water.

During one session, the speakers and participants were joined by Rolf Stahlhofen, an internationally acclaimed German musical artist and a UN HABITAT “Messenger of Truth,” who shared his vision for the creation of his new song, “Water is Life,” which debuted later that day at the Expo.  He based the song on the human connection to water and the right to water for all people.

Participants also visited Khayelitsha, one of South Africa’s largest and fastest-growing townships, to open the Water Expo—an interactive theater project modeling proper water behavior and ethics—with music, dancing and a presentation of Project WET water education materials to a local teacher and her students.

The key recommendations and conclusions of the seminar were: incorporating the five human values of peace, love, truth, non-violence and right-conduct into educational projects; focusing on behavioral change through institutionalization of school curriculum, political buy-in and diversifying implementation strategies; and incorporating best practices, including monitoring and evaluation, increased local ownership, utilization of local knowledge and traditional practices and enhancing local skills.

This post was prepared by the Project WET Foundation.

Did you miss yesterday’s live webcast of the U.S. State Department’s “Conversations with America” video series?  You can watch the full episode in the player below!  In this session, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero joined the co-chair of the Global Water Challenge Board of Directors Harriet Babbitt for a conversation on Global Water Issues in recognition of World Water Day.

Check out this great blog post by Chris Elias, President and CEO of PATH, an international nonprofit organization committed to global health solutions:

In the US, we tend to take clean water and toilets for granted, and when an American child does get diarrhea, it’s a minor inconvenience. For children in the poorest countries, though, diarrhea can be a death sentence, which makes prevention through safe water and sanitation that much more critical. This year for World Water Day, tap into your connections and communities to spread the word: safe water saves lives.

PATH does great work for global health and WASH and we’re excited to be working with them and all of the other organizations that are working to raise awareness of global WASH issues through the celebration of World Water Day.  To learn more about the coalition, what we’re doing, and how you can lend your voice to the cause, visit waterday.org.