Did you know that more than $1.2 billion worth of water infrastructure investment has been wasted over the last 20 years on water wells that sit broken today?
It’s time to start talking about the fact that drilling wells and giving away water to communities will never solve the water crisis. It’s time to acknowledge that wells drilled today are a liability that will eventually malfunction, break or become contaminated tomorrow without a self-sustaining business model behind them.
Charity alone will never solve the water crisis.
Charity is only effective when it’s used to empower local people with the opportunity to solve their own problems in ways that can be self-sustained locally.
The answer is not more wells. It’s not more money. It’s not better filtration. It’s not more technology.
All of those are important, but they’re not enough.
The solution to the water crisis is local people living in the communities where water is scarce. The solution to the water crisis lies in the hands, heads and hearts of those who know its tragic effects firsthand.
The water crisis will end when water charities start working toward their ultimate obsolescence because every day we exist is another day people continue suffering from the injustice of this crisis. The water crisis will end when we empower heroes instead of trying to be the heroes. The crisis will end when we stop giving water away and start equipping local entrepreneurs to provide water service to their communities as a business.
At Water4, our goal is to put ourselves out of business.
We don’t have to solve the water crisis. The very same people who live with and suffer from the lack of safe water on a daily basis can and will solve the crisis when we start training and supporting them to do it themselves instead of sending well-intentioned outsiders to solve it for them.
Will you join us in empowering, coming alongside and equipping even more local heroes to be the solution to their own water crisis? When we all start doing that, they will make the water crisis history once and for all.
