Welcome to the Global Water Website

I’m glad you found us.

Let me start off by saying – Global Water is an international, non-profit humanitarian organization founded in 1982. We’re focused on creating safe water supplies, sanitation facilities and hygiene-related facilities for rural villagers in developing countries. We believe the lack of safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are the root causes of hunger, disease and poverty throughout the developing world. Our water projects have an immediate life-changing impact, particularly for women and children, who have the responsibility to gather water for their families every day of their lives in the developing world. Successful Global Water projects utilize water and sanitation as a tool to create sustainable socioeconomic development in these poor rural communities.

Global Water is also a volunteer-based organization and therefore none of us receive a salary for what we do. Practically all contributions that are donated to Global Water go right into water projects implemented by non-profit organizations in the developing countries, themselves (referred to as non-governmental organizations or NGOs). Working directly with NGOs, Global Water provides funding for specific projects (either partial or total), program management assistance, and technical support with water treatment technologies and equipment.

If you are interested in finding out what Global Water is all about, you can read our website sections entitled “Who We Are” “Our Background” and “Our Approach”. But perhaps the fastest way to understand us is to read a magazine article published in 2008 about us and our latest Trip Report. Our Trip Reports, in particular, will give you an insight into what we do, how we do it and even why we work in the developing world in the first place. In addition, you can find more details about our projects by reading our latest Progress Report and seeing where we’ve worked through the “Completed Projects” page .

There have been some very encouraging things happening in the world of philanthropy recently that has given me reason to hope that significant help may be coming to the rural poor in developing countries. But for all the talk, by far most philanthropic organizations do not fund water projects. It seems they fund everything else, with scholarships being the most common gift.

But water projects have been notoriously underserved by all measures of international aid. And yet when one creates a set of priorities for helping people in need, safe water is always at the top of the list. Without safe water, all other forms of help, including food and such important health factors as medicines and vaccinations, pale in significance. Health practitioners I’ve met agree that, generally speaking, children are no better off with vaccinations if they are drinking microbiologically contaminated water everyday of their lives. But setting up a temporary clinic to give vaccinations is far easier than supplying a safe water supply for the life of a child.

Ever since the beginning of international aid, the rural poor have been neglected by almost everyone in a position to help them, especially their own political leaders. It was startling for us to first realize that many leaders in developing countries do not care enough to help the majority of their own country’s population specifically because they live in rural areas (often making up 70% of the population). Why, you might ask? The simple truth is that many leaders in developing countries are focused on the business of their country that generates wealth and not on the well-being of their own people. And that is the simple truth why people living in most rural areas in the developing world are still living basically as humans did thousands of years ago in our technology-advanced world of the 21st Century. Ideally, the leaders of the developed world would help their developing world counterparts become more enlightened in terms of human rights and their responsibility to provide basic human needs to their fellow countrymen, including safe water and sanitation facilities. But interactions between developed countries and developing world leaders are also focused on doing business, so I’m afraid I do not see that happening anytime soon.

The bottom line to this letter is the fact that the rural poor living in developing countries desperately need safe water and sanitation facility projects and a voice in the international aid community. Global Water will continue to fund water and sanitation projects specifically to benefit the rural poor and we’ll continue to help give them that voice every chance we get.

Thank you for listening and my
Best Regards,
Ted Kuepper
Executive Director