Get more out of CSR commitments

Corporate support of NGOs amounts to much more than fundraising, as WaterAid’s Hannah Greig explains.

Since the water industry founded WaterAid in 1981, we have helped to deliver clean water to more than 23 million people and safe sanitation to more than 21 million people in some of the world’s poorest and most marginalised communities.

We have achieved this by working with partners in our country programmes – private utility companies, local non-governmental organisations and local and national government departments – to address the specific needs of communities and develop lasting solutions. To reach everyone everywhere by 2030 we must carry this method through all our work.

That means thinking differently about how WaterAid works with the private sector here in the UK. Financial support is, and will continue to be, vital to enable us to deliver safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), but money is only part of the story.

A broader approach

To achieve universal access to WASH we will need to work with new sectors, such as housing, water and wastewater management, and urban planning – areas in which private sector experience and expertise might exceed our own.

We need the skills, capacity and insight of these partners to enable us to move further and faster together.  

Our partnership with the water industry demonstrates this evolution of a partnership approach.

Like all water companies in the UK, Yorkshire Water knows the value of water. Every day they supply more than one billion litres of drinking water to the Yorkshire region, and treat around one billion litres of waste water before returning it safely to the environment. As one of WaterAid’s founding partners, they also understand the fundamental role clean water plays in overcoming poverty, and every year employees raise funds, volunteer their time and support our advocacy work. Last year Yorkshire Water raised £281,000 for WaterAid, enough to help 18,730 people access safe water.

But in 2013 the partnership moved beyond traditional fundraising targets and Yorkshire Water fully embedded WaterAid in its corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy, with the inclusion of global safe water as a business objective in their Blueprint for Yorkshire corporate strategy. The company committed to raising £1 million in five years to fund water and sanitation projects across Ethiopia, and agreed to support WaterAid across six key areas, including capacity building.

International training

In June 2015, three Yorkshire Water technicians and engineers spent a week with Bishoftu Town Water Supply and Sewage Enterprise to assist training, as part of WaterAid Ethiopia’s capacity-building project with 20 urban utilities.

In consultation with the utilities and local government, asset management, leakage and water quality were identified as critical challenges – challenges well understood by Yorkshire Water. Although, of course, not all challenges and solutions are the same in Bradford as in Bishoftu, the Ethiopian utilities managers learned about the practicalities of tackling these challenges thanks to the Yorkshire Water employees’ hands-on approach to training.

The employees visited the water authority and their assets before running training with 20 water utility managers, regional and national government officials. The training focused on demonstrations of equipment such as listening sticks, ground microphones, and chlorine testing, and on sharing experiences of district metering, logging callouts and working with regulators.

Joel Tidswell, one of the Yorkshire Water technicians said: “The trip was an amazing experience and I enjoyed every minute. The big issue for my colleagues in Ethiopia is the lack of records. I was able to share my knowledge of developing schematic drawings so they can start recording where their assets are.

“We met many Ethiopians and were treated so well during our visit it was a shock to see that many live in conditions we could only imagine in Yorkshire. Our colleagues from Bishoftu were very keen to learn and put our knowledge into practice and I hope this will ultimately make a real difference to people’s lives in Ethiopia.

Mutual experiences

For David Stevenson, head of Water Distribution at Yorkshire Water, the benefits of his team’s participation in the capacity building are clear, including the new relationships the three engineers have made in Ethiopia that will continue and develop.

“They have demonstrated skills acquired in Yorkshire that can be taken for granted, and supported engineers and technicians in Ethiopia to deliver safe and reliable water supplies,” he said. “They have all developed personally and professionally from this fantastic experience.”