Last month, you read about our CEO, Ned Breslin. He mentioned Water For People’s unique and ambitious approach to solving the world water crisis: Everyone Forever.
On May 7, we’re hosting the Mayor of Rulindo, Rwanda — Justus Kangwagye — at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to celebrate the kick-off of our Rulindo Challenge. This is the first effort of its kind at this scale, anywhere in the world, to bring full water coverage to Everyone Forever.
Everyone Forever is based on the experiences of health-based eradication efforts like polio, malaria, and HIV-AIDS that set a simple yet ambitious target and is systematically programmed to achieve that outcome. The principles of Everyone Forever are simple, compelling and completely unique in the water sector.
Here’s how it works:
Everyone means every family, every school and every clinic in a defined geographic region — like a district or a municipality — has access to improved water supplies.
Governments and communities provide financial inputs from the start, this ensures local accountability and the desire from the community to make sure the program succeeds.
Forever means that a high level of water service is maintained for generations. Local institutions and communities are responsible for the water system management, including monitoring, operation and maintenance, and capital replacement.
Forever means that water systems expand and improve as populations grow and shift. Forever forces all actors to change the way we approach our work.
Water For People will monitor the work for 10 years, with the ultimate goal of transferring full responsibility to local communities and governments.
Everyone Forever in Rulindo
Leading Everyone Forever is Water For People Rwanda, which established the Rulindo Challenge, a game-changing initiative with the Government of Rwanda and the District of Rulindo to provide full water coverage for the Rulindo District by the end of 2014.
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“Now what we want from NGOs is not to implement projects spread across all the districts, but rather to focus on one district and finish as Water For People does.” |
Emmanuel Hategekimana
coordinator, Water and Sanitation
Ministry of Infrastructure, Rwanda
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The ambitious goal: safe water coverage for all 265,000 people in 494 villages ahead of the 2015 Millennium Development Goal deadline. Full coverage for Everyone. Every family. Every school. Every clinic. Continuous flow of safe water based on the government standards of distance, access, quantity and quality.
This forward-looking partnership is a transformative change in worldwide development models that shifts from never-ending community-based projects and open-ended international NGO involvement to a systematic program designed to:
- Tackle sustainability challenges by focusing on systems management, appropriate tariffs for access, and technical support to ensure the infrastructure is managed properly, fixed when needed, and replaced when required.
- Serve as a model that is replicated elsewhere in the country, and in other parts of the world, without the financial involvement of Water For People.
To learn more about what is happening with the Rulindo Challenge, please visit our website.
The program is already making waves. “Now what we want from NGOs is not to implement projects spread across all the districts, but rather to focus on one district and finish as Water For People does,” Emmanuel Hategekimana, coordinator of Water and Sanitation of the Ministry of Infrastructure of Rwanda, said in late 2011 at a national event.
As Ned mentioned last month, we’re trying to put ourselves out of business. If Everyone in an area has access to safe water and sanitation resources, Forever, then they don’t need us — and we’re happy.
Please support the Everyone Forever movement by:
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