USAID and P&G Highlight Partnership for Safe Drinking Water in Africa

08/03/07 Procter & Gamble and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) are highlighting their partnership to provide safe drinking water at the household level to millions of children in Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda.

"This partnership is a significant step to provide safe drinking water in Africa and elsewhere for millions of people," said Dr. Kent Hill, Assistant Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development for Global Health. "This unique effort demonstrates the power of partnership by leveraging the skills and resources of Procter & Gamble and the U.S. government to reduce diarrheal disease, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 4,000 children per day around the globe."

This partnership focuses on provision of two proven, cost-effective, household-level technologies to disinfect drinking water. WaterGuard is a dilute bleach product developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and PUR Purifier of Water is a powdered water treatment product developed by Procter & Gamble and CDC. These disinfection technologies have been shown to reduce disease and death in numerous health intervention trials. The technologies are now in the process of being promoted using social marketing and other approaches to raise awareness and change behavior in many African countries. They are also being used to provide safe drinking water for emergency relief, including the recent floods in Kenya and Ethiopia, and to help address cholera outbreaks in the Congo and Malawi.

"We have provided more than 600 million liters of safe drinking water over the last 3 years," said Charlotte Otto, Global External Relations Officer at P&G. "Our efforts to date have been a drop in the ocean compared to the vast need, and this partnership enables us to scale-up our efforts in order to make a much larger health impact."

While USAID and P&G are key collaborators on this effort, it is comprised of a network of partnerships focused on the provision of safe drinking water. The main partner for social marketing is PSI, a mutual partner of USAID and P&G in many countries. Currently PSI has outreach programs for PUR in 8 countries, and WaterGuard, with USAID support, in 18 countries. More than 6 million sachets of PUR and 7 million bottles of WaterGuard have already been provided in Kenya, Malawi, and Ethiopia.

Other partners include the CDC's Global AIDS program, Rotary International, and local community-based women's groups to provide the products to people in part of the Nyanza region in Kenya. P&G also provided 1 million sachets of PUR in Kenya to people living with HIV/AIDs through the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent and Kenyan Red Cross. In addition, P&G employees are volunteering to provide safe drinking water training in schools. P&G is donating PUR to orphanages through the International Council of Nurses and their affiliates in Kenya and Malawi, working with YWCA to create a sustainable local income generation project in Kenya, and collaborating with UNICEF, CARE and the Global Water Challenge group to provide safe drinking water in schools in Kenya.