Providing safe water

The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation works to improve the well-being of the ultra poor in targeted developing countries by supporting sustainable access to safe water.

Access to safe water, in conjunction with adequate sanitation and hygiene services, can improve the overall well-being of the world's most disadvantaged and vulnerable people.  780 million people globally do not have access to an improved water source.  The vast majority of people without access, 653 million, are the ultra poor, living in rural areas.  In addition, 2.5 billion lack access to improved sanitation, including 1 billion children.  Lack of access to safe water is a major challenge for developing countries and is a significant contributor to morbidity factors in impoverished communities such as disease, limited education, and diminished productivity.

In 2009, the Foundation conducted a Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) landscape research (pdf) project to assess the issue of safe water around the world and to guide development of our water initiative strategy.

Vision

In partnership with other funders and organizations, the Hilton Foundation will provide sustainable safe water access for at least 1 million people over five years.  In doing so, the Foundation will play a vital role in helping achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goal in target countries to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Approach

Directed by our founder to help those most in need, the Foundation focuses its grantmaking on the rural poor in regions of Africa, Mexico and India with low water access and high incidence of water-related diseases.  Although our focus is on water access, we operate within the broader WASH sector through partnerships with other organizations.  Core to the Foundation's grant making approach are long-term partnerships and leveraged grants.

In 2010, the Hilton Foundation board of directors approved a strategy for sustainable water access (pdf) to guide out water work over the next five years. Key initiative areas of our current work include:

• Supporting sustainable and scalable safe water access interventions and systems
• Strengthening the enabling environment for WASH interventions in target countries
• Disseminating relevant sector-wide knowledge

Over the past two decades the Foundation has delivered more than $90 million in grant funds to provide more than 2 million people with WASH services in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Niger and water stressed regions of India and Mexico.