A glass half full
If you’ve donated money to a water charity, congratulations. You’ve stepped up to try to solve one of the world’s most pressing problems — the fact that roughly 750 million people do not have access to clean water.
Has your donation made a lasting difference? That’s hard to know.
Big water charities point to numbers that, they say, demonstrate their impact. Since its founding in 2006, charity: water says it has funded 16,138 water projects. Water.org, in its latest annual report, says that in 2013 it completed 174 community-based water projects, constructed 73,081 toilets, established 66,632 household water connections and served 606,012 people with water and sanitation. In 2013–2014, Water Aid says it reached 2 million people with water and 3 million with sanitation.
But the charities, as a rule, do not report on how many of those projects are providing clean water a year, two or five years after they were built. Some don’t know. That, by itself, is a sign that something’s amiss.
As it happens, the poor countries where these charities operate are littered with water projects that need repair. In what is admittedly…
