Breslin spent more than 16 years in Africa working on water and sanitation before joining Water For People and introducing bold, systemic solutions to critical issues facing the sector. Water For People partners with communities in developing countries to create sustainable, locally-maintained drinking water solutions and supports market-driven sanitation solutions, such as its Sanitation as a Business program. Accountability and sustainability are major focuses for the organization. It recently developed a new open-source monitoring and evaluation technology called FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch,) which leverages Android technology and Google Earth software for tracking the status of water points at least 10 years after implementation.
IMPACT AS OF JAN. 2013:
In less than three years, FLOW has gained traction in the water sector, having been used in dozens of countries, with tens of thousands of surveys completed and water points mapped. Water For People field-tested it widely in eight countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Notably, in Liberia, Water For People and Gallatin Systems (the codeveloper of FLOW) enabled Water and Sanitation Program Africa at the World Bank, the Liberian government, and other partners to deploy FLOW so they could map water points and school sanitation conditions. In the field, 120 enumerators, in 40 days, mapped over 7,000 water points and close to 1,300 schools.
Water For People currently works in 10 countries around the world.
At the end of 2011, Chinda, Honduras was the first municipality to reach every family, every school, and every clinic with safe drinking water. Everyone Forever is a unique effort to provide water and sanitation to Everyone in targeted districts and municipalities, Forever. It provides a model for greater replication, leading to a push for national full water and sanitation coverage.
They mobilize volunteers through their World Water Corps®, an innovative program that serves the needs of local communities, Water For People, and its local partners and builds up a cadre of dedicated, caring ambassadors to the world water and sanitation crisis. Established in 2007, the World Water Corps monitors the work that happens in the field. Through observation and interviews with people on the ground in homes, clinics, schools, and community water points, World Water Corps is on the front lines of determining what is happening and what is needed by the people who need it the most.
Social entrepreneurs don't generally set out to incite protests or topple despots but they are revolutionaries nonetheless. They understand that wars can be waged by a thousand cuts, that crimes against humanity occur when millions of children die of diarrhea or tetanus. When medicine fails the poor, when education squanders young educators, and sacrifices its young.
And they refuse to accept that this is reality, the status quo, just the way things are. They know better and they set out to make it so.
The 2011 Skoll Award winners we honor tonight offer scalable, proven solutions to these toughest of problems and to the unacceptable conditions of poverty and injustice that breed and sustain them.
Ned Breslin, Water for People. Despite massive investments by the development community, the world is not on track to meet millennium development goals addressing sanitation and water quality. Globally 884 million people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion to sanitation. Working in Africa for sixteen years, Ned learned that solutions to sanitation and clean drinking water must be generated and sustained by communities.
Water for People puts stake holders back in charge of their own water systems. Working with communities to design and build systems that provide full coverage, Water for People insists on a standard as simple as it is powerful. To secure safe drinking water and sanitation for every clinic, school, and home in every community.
Its newest technological tool, FLOW, uses mobile phones equipped with open source software to document working and failed water points, an innovation poised to become a standard assessment tool for the aid community. By 2014, Water For People aims for 100% coverage in three of the 11 countries in which it is already active and it is committed to verifying the sustainability of it's solutions three, six and ten years following their implementation.
Ned Breslin, Water For People.
Rain mixes with the distinct smell of burning charcoal, tall grass, and maize stalks that scream Africa with every breath. The Rwandan mountains reach for the sky as thousands gather in the district of Rulindo to say we are going to eradicate water poverty in our district. Everyone. We are going to get every school; we are going to get every clinic; we are going to get every household.
Not this project over that project. Not this community - but not that one. Not this school - but that one's too hard. We're not going to hide behind the facade of demand, that is used as a shield by NGO's, world wide, to not hear the voices of the hardest to reach - the poorest and most vulnerable.
If you listen very carefully. Everyone is demanding clean water, forever. The Mayor, Yustus, is the one who came up with this idea, and he now stands in the rain before residents of Rulindo, and he says, "I'm in." We succeed if everyone gets water. The government of Paul Kagame is in. Water For People can't help but be in.
The residents of Rulindo scream out and shout, filling the air with their roar, putting their money on the table, putting their energy behind this work, to say that everyone is going to be served. There are no beneficiaries here. These are active agents of change who want to spark a revolution. We are so honored to be part of this process but we know we can't do it alone.
We feel the wind behind our back and we now feel the fresh push coming from the Skoll Foundation. We're going to push the frontiers of monitoring and try to give voice to those people, not through the intermediary of some NGO speaking on behalf of them. But let's hear them, let's hear that roar, let's get behind behind it, everyone.
It's powerful. We're going to take, we're going to try and do away with the 60-page reports that nobody reads. That is a justification for funding, that is a way to ask for more funding, but doesn't transform lives. We're going to try to harness the power of visual data of music, of art to drive this movement forward.
And as the crowd begins to disperse, a little girl skips over to me. She's ten years old. She's beautiful. She reaches out her hand and she says to me, "What is your name?" We chat, she's great, and she skips away. And I know what success is. Success is that we start to hear her voice. That we know that she never has to go to a muddy puddle again to fetch dirty water, but can grow and thrive and be whoever she wants to be.
Success is when we take the energy and dynamics of places like Relindo and similar districts in Honduras and Guatemala and Bolivia. We don't just say, "Hey, this is a nice little pilot. This is really great, and it's going to be a model in a sea of failure. But it starts to spread, starts to go over everyone's in.
Why this district and not that district? We can't do it alone, but we can try. Is it bold and ambitious? You bet. Can we do it? I have no idea. But I know we can't do it, if we do it ourselves and I know we can't do it if we don't hear my friend's voice.
So Water for People embraces this challenge on the part of many who are in this fight. Join us. We are excited, we're going to find a way to tell this story, we're going to hear the voices of people. And not only people of Rwanda, or Honduras, or Indiawill hold us accountable. Everyone will hold usaccountable. Thank you very much.
Skoll Entrepreneur(s): Ned Breslin Change(s) Addressed: Water and Sanitation
Breslin spent more than 16 years in Africa working on water and sanitation before joining Water For People and introducing bold, systemic solutions to critical issues facing the sector. Water For People partners with communities in developing countries to create sustainable, locally-maintained drinking water solutions and supports market-driven sanitation solutions, such as its Sanitation as a Business program. Accountability and sustainability are major focuses for the organization. It recently developed a new open-source monitoring and evaluation technology called FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch,) which leverages Android technology and Google Earth software for tracking the status of water points at least 10 years after implementation.
IMPACT AS OF JAN. 2013:
In less than three years, FLOW has gained traction in the water sector, having been used in dozens of countries, with tens of thousands of surveys completed and water points mapped. Water For People field-tested it widely in eight countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Notably, in Liberia, Water For People and Gallatin Systems (the codeveloper of FLOW) enabled Water and Sanitation Program Africa at the World Bank, the Liberian government, and other partners to deploy FLOW so they could map water points and school sanitation conditions. In the field, 120 enumerators, in 40 days, mapped over 7,000 water points and close to 1,300 schools.
Water For People currently works in 10 countries around the world.
At the end of 2011, Chinda, Honduras was the first municipality to reach every family, every school, and every clinic with safe drinking water. Everyone Forever is a unique effort to provide water and sanitation to Everyone in targeted districts and municipalities, Forever. It provides a model for greater replication, leading to a push for national full water and sanitation coverage.
They mobilize volunteers through their World Water Corps®, an innovative program that serves the needs of local communities, Water For People, and its local partners and builds up a cadre of dedicated, caring ambassadors to the world water and sanitation crisis. Established in 2007, the World Water Corps monitors the work that happens in the field. Through observation and interviews with people on the ground in homes, clinics, schools, and community water points, World Water Corps is on the front lines of determining what is happening and what is needed by the people who need it the most.
Social entrepreneurs don't generally set out to incite protests or topple despots but they are revolutionaries nonetheless. They understand that wars can be waged by a thousand cuts, that crimes against humanity occur when millions of children die of diarrhea or tetanus. When medicine fails the poor, when education squanders young educators, and sacrifices its young.
And they refuse to accept that this is reality, the status quo, just the way things are. They know better and they set out to make it so.
The 2011 Skoll Award winners we honor tonight offer scalable, proven solutions to these toughest of problems and to the unacceptable conditions of poverty and injustice that breed and sustain them.
Ned Breslin, Water for People. Despite massive investments by the development community, the world is not on track to meet millennium development goals addressing sanitation and water quality. Globally 884 million people lack access to clean water and 2.6 billion to sanitation. Working in Africa for sixteen years, Ned learned that solutions to sanitation and clean drinking water must be generated and sustained by communities.
Water for People puts stake holders back in charge of their own water systems. Working with communities to design and build systems that provide full coverage, Water for People insists on a standard as simple as it is powerful. To secure safe drinking water and sanitation for every clinic, school, and home in every community.
Its newest technological tool, FLOW, uses mobile phones equipped with open source software to document working and failed water points, an innovation poised to become a standard assessment tool for the aid community. By 2014, Water For People aims for 100% coverage in three of the 11 countries in which it is already active and it is committed to verifying the sustainability of it's solutions three, six and ten years following their implementation.
Ned Breslin, Water For People.
Rain mixes with the distinct smell of burning charcoal, tall grass, and maize stalks that scream Africa with every breath. The Rwandan mountains reach for the sky as thousands gather in the district of Rulindo to say we are going to eradicate water poverty in our district. Everyone. We are going to get every school; we are going to get every clinic; we are going to get every household.
Not this project over that project. Not this community - but not that one. Not this school - but that one's too hard. We're not going to hide behind the facade of demand, that is used as a shield by NGO's, world wide, to not hear the voices of the hardest to reach - the poorest and most vulnerable.
If you listen very carefully. Everyone is demanding clean water, forever. The Mayor, Yustus, is the one who came up with this idea, and he now stands in the rain before residents of Rulindo, and he says, "I'm in." We succeed if everyone gets water. The government of Paul Kagame is in. Water For People can't help but be in.
The residents of Rulindo scream out and shout, filling the air with their roar, putting their money on the table, putting their energy behind this work, to say that everyone is going to be served. There are no beneficiaries here. These are active agents of change who want to spark a revolution. We are so honored to be part of this process but we know we can't do it alone.
We feel the wind behind our back and we now feel the fresh push coming from the Skoll Foundation. We're going to push the frontiers of monitoring and try to give voice to those people, not through the intermediary of some NGO speaking on behalf of them. But let's hear them, let's hear that roar, let's get behind behind it, everyone.
It's powerful. We're going to take, we're going to try and do away with the 60-page reports that nobody reads. That is a justification for funding, that is a way to ask for more funding, but doesn't transform lives. We're going to try to harness the power of visual data of music, of art to drive this movement forward.
And as the crowd begins to disperse, a little girl skips over to me. She's ten years old. She's beautiful. She reaches out her hand and she says to me, "What is your name?" We chat, she's great, and she skips away. And I know what success is. Success is that we start to hear her voice. That we know that she never has to go to a muddy puddle again to fetch dirty water, but can grow and thrive and be whoever she wants to be.
Success is when we take the energy and dynamics of places like Relindo and similar districts in Honduras and Guatemala and Bolivia. We don't just say, "Hey, this is a nice little pilot. This is really great, and it's going to be a model in a sea of failure. But it starts to spread, starts to go over everyone's in.
Why this district and not that district? We can't do it alone, but we can try. Is it bold and ambitious? You bet. Can we do it? I have no idea. But I know we can't do it, if we do it ourselves and I know we can't do it if we don't hear my friend's voice.
So Water for People embraces this challenge on the part of many who are in this fight. Join us. We are excited, we're going to find a way to tell this story, we're going to hear the voices of people. And not only people of Rwanda, or Honduras, or Indiawill hold us accountable. Everyone will hold usaccountable. Thank you very much.
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