Clean water isn’t enough
By Pete Yao, Thankyou’s Chief Impact Officer
At Thankyou, we believe in the power of partnerships.
We exist to help end global poverty in this lifetime. Our role is to serve those living in vulnerable communities and fund the dreams and visions of our awesome Impact Partners. We know we can only do this by partnering with the most dedicated, passionate and skilled people.
In eight years, we’ve been proud to partner with organisations who implement empowering and sustainable water solutions that are community-led, owned and managed.
The journey we’ve travelled with our Impact Partners has been an incredibly valuable learning experience for us.
When we began, we set out to do a few things:
Communicate our impact in a way that was easy to understand for the busy customer walking down a crowded aisle in the supermarket
Create a clear link between the products and the solutions they fund. So our water range funded safe water access, food range funded food security programs and the body care funded hygiene and sanitation
Prove to our customers where their money was going and connect them to their impact, so we created Track Your Impact
We knew that funding safe water sources (e.g. wells, rainwater tanks, water filters) was crucial, but without education and training on hygiene practices underpinning the program, it wasn’t enough to prevent people from getting sick. Hygiene education, therefore, has always been a crucial part of every water program we have funded and will continue to fund.
Along the way, we also learnt that most people become sick from water that’s contaminated by faecal matter. This means that even if communities have access to water and hygiene education, without access to sanitation (toilets), they still have a high risk of getting sick. So in 2013, sanitation became a crucial part of the hygiene programs we funded and will continue to fund through our body care range.
In fact, we were surprised to learn that more people have mobile phones globally than toilets (UN, 2015).
Within the international development sector, water, hygiene and sanitation solutions are always funded together. They are holistically integrated and called WASH (which stands for Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) programs.
We believe so passionately in serving communities with the best solutions that will lift them out of poverty, so it’s a no-brainer for us to combine the profits from our water and body care ranges to fund WASH programs holistically.
Put more simply, because Thankyou exists to serve people globally, at the risk of not creating easy-to-understand content on our packaging, we think integrating the funds from our body care and water products together is an easy and important step for us to take.
So, when you’re drinking your bottle of Thankyou water or using the Thankyou body care range, know that you’re partnering with us to fund safe water solutions alongside hygiene and sanitation solutions for vulnerable communities globally.
Ultimately, just as holistic solutions lead to healthy outcomes for communities, organisations that champion and enable these holistic solutions to succeed, are just as crucial.
The pathway towards ending global poverty will only be realised as we walk together, hand in hand through partnering with one another. We are all in this together.
