The Water Trust Inc.

EMPOWER THE POOREST RURAL COMMUNITIES IN UGANDA TO PROVIDE THEIR CHILDREN CLEAN, SUSTAINABLE WATER AND HEALTHY, HYGIENIC HOMES.

A world where every community can provide their children clean water, a healthy home, and a brighter

Goal One: Scale self-help groups for sustainable water and sanitation: By 2025, we aim to help one million people benefit from water sustained by self-help groups.

Goal Two: Pioneer low-cost interventions that improve health and well-being: By 2023, we want to build a robust evidence for 1-2 low-cost training programs that can significantly improve health outcomes.

Goal Three: Establish a Ugandan leadership team, systems, and network of engaged board members, funders, research partners that can drive growth and meet or exceed all INGO standards.

A leadership training event was held with The Water Trust staff in 2021. The Water Trust added a COO position in Uganda in 2021 to lead coaching and mentorship to the team's middle management. The Water Trust regularly promotes its staff to lead presentations and engagements with government counterparts and peer NGOs.

The Water Trust regularly presents at industry conferences and collaborates with researchers to produce relevant knowledge and learnings, such as novel research on the the impact of poultry rearing on child health. The Water Trust has partners both with foundations in the US as well as with social enterprises like EarthEnable and private sector companies like ENGIE. Collaborations both include funding The Water Trust's work as well as linking self-help groups to life-improving goods and services (such as solar energy products and earthen flooring.) The Water Trust is currently in talks with peer NGOs on helping them replicate the self-help group for sustainable water program model in other contexts.

The largest change we made was the addition of the COO position. This position, staffed by a Ugandan Country National, addresses a critical need for capacity building internally as well as for shifting operational leadership from the US to Uganda. This was in response to positive external changes, namely increases in funding that increased our operational size and complexity significantly (approximately three-fold increase.) Beyond this change, as noted previously, the organization has had to develop and implement new tools and processes for managing staff remotely, with field offices lightly staffed and largely being places that individuals would sign out and return equipment and resources to accomplish work that had been agreed to with the district government as essential and necessary. Programmatically, The Water Trust ceased its programs from March 2020 to June 2020, and shifted to purely remote promotion, using technologies from IVR and SMS to radio and public address systems. We shifted our priorities to fund critical PPE gaps at the district government and health center levels and generally shifted our focus to COVID-19 during this time period. From July onward, COVID-19 risk-reduction was incorporated into all our internal SOPs and programming messages.