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| Christine Zurbach, VP of Philantrophy, Lifewater Internl. |
Lifewater International was started by Bill Ashe in the 1960s. Can you tell us a bit about his story and the motivation behind his work?
Bill Ashe was a third-generation water pump business owner in Los Angeles. In the ’60s Bill was moved by a call for missions at his church to travel down to Mexico and fix a windmill handpump at an orphanage. He responded to the call to love his neighbor as himself. Bill began inviting his friends and family to join in him humbly alleviating suffering in poor communities. The mission grew and expanded as a volunteer mission and was formally registered as Lifewater in 1977.
According to its website, Lifewater International’s mission is “focusing on locally appropriate solutions in leadership, ownership and technology,” towards the end of “ending the global water and sanitation crisis, one village at a time.” Why is the aspect of ‘locally appropriate’ so important?
We implement custom water technology to ensure that the water point is affordable and maintainable. Through research and community involvement, we decide the best water access for the context. This means if the land allows for us to do a capped spring we will do that or a hand-dug well or a deep water well. For example, some communities prefer spring water to well water so if we are able to provide safe water from a spring we will seek to construct that source. We research to find what is the most affordable and appropriate solution so that local spare parts can be found and that we are not bringing in technologies that cannot be maintained in the future.
Lifewater International has a forty-year history that includes the use of field trainers who teach hygiene and hand pump repair. Can you tell us why these two aspects of your organization’s work are important?
Yes, as Lifewater started as a volunteer organization we worked through volunteer field trainers who would go overseas for a few weeks and train our in-country partners. Although, that provided initial help to communities it really was not built on a long-term partnership to help ensure that all households were met with life-saving hygiene and sanitation practices.
In 2015, we launched our Vision of a Healthy Village where Lifewater hired its own local staff and set up regional programs that could take WASH messages to each and every household through trained national staff that know the language and culture. This is a long-term labor of love to walk with communities for multiple years and empower them to make changes on their own. Instead of a two-day, community-level training, you have interventions happening at houses daily for a 2-3 year period. The results have been unbelievable!
Our local staff are Christians and they choose to live and serve among these very remote communities.
In 2002 Lifewater International became part of the WASH (Water, Access, Sanitation and Hygiene) strategy group. Why is the work of WASH so important?
Water access alone cannot stop water-borne diseases. Without the proper handling of waste (sanitation) and proper hygiene practices (washing hands, storing using water safely, using a drying rack, etc.), communities will continue to suffer the consequences of water-borne illness even with a safe water source. Even safe water can become contaminated very easily.
According to Lifewater International, every sixty seconds a child dies from a preventable waterborne disease Worldwide some 844,000,000 people live without clean water and 2.3 billion people don’t have access to basic sanitation. That’s a huge portion of humanity. Would you like to go a bit deeper with the ramifications of these numbers?
Every 60 seconds a vulnerable child under the age of 5 dies from a water-borne illness. It kills more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined. There are a number of diseases that many people don’t realize are water-related. Typhoid, Cholera, Giardia, Dysentery, E. Coli, Hepatitis A, Salmonella. All of these diseases can be prevented with WASH.
Poor sanitation affects 1 in 3 people in the world and it’s honestly not a topic many like to discuss. As we work with communities it’s important for them to realize the problem with human waste – yes poop – and how without proper management of it, feces is contaminating their environment and making children sick.
Lifewater’s website also contains a startling statistic: twenty-five percent of new water projects in the world fail within three years, but the success rate of Lifewater’s projects is ninety-two percent. What’s the main reason for such success?
High water point failure rate is a big problem in our sector. Much of that has to do with quality engineering, construction, and community participation (buy-in). Traditionally, the focus was on providing a community with basic WASH training and a safe water source often times this could happen over a one-week period. What we’ve found is those changes simply don’t last. Lifewater’s Vision of a Healthy Village strategy places safe water provision as the last step in a robust program model that begins with a transformation of the village’s hygiene and sanitation. Communities work incredibly hard to make changes on their own with the goal of being certified as Open Defecation Free and having 90% of the homes achieve Healthy Home status. It’s a significant accomplishment. Communities are required to meet a community contribution and contribute up to 20% of the costs of the water point as well as have an active water committee group and savings. Communities are owners of the water point.
In addition to that, our engineers design a solution that is meant to last for time and through different seasons. Custom engineering and quality construction is a huge part of our success rates as well. Currently, we have 99% sustainable water points in our Vision of a Healthy Village!
Lifewater’s work seems to be focused on Ethiopia, Uganda and Cambodia. Can you tell us the reasoning behind this decision?
Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are the two areas of the world that suffer from the greatest economic water scarcity and has vast amounts of rural populations that do not have access to basic water. In 2020 we will be expanding into Tanzania where statistics tell us that 9.2% of children in rural Tanzania die before their fifth birthday. There are over 23 million people living without access to safe water and 70% of them live in rural areas.
How about Lifewater’s focus on raising up servant leaders? Overall your organization’s website mentions that “we shall be known by our love, not our position or status.” Can you comment on how these two focal points may be interconnected?
Servant leadership is a core conviction of this ministry. We are so intent upon it that we take all of our managers through servant leadership courses through Development Associates International’s ministry.
We look for leaders who see their position or status as an opportunity to serve their team and the communities we serve
Lifewater International is also a faith-based organization. How does faith come in to play in its mission, work and within the organization?
Lifewater works alongside local churches, mobilizing believers to help their neighbors learn healthy habits and transform their communities. This can look like ensuring churches have safe water and clean toilets for their congregants, training pastors in the importance of hygiene, and connecting local churches to serve the vulnerable in their community.
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