The
Coca-Cola Africa Foundation and WaterAid, a leading international nonprofit, came together in 2013
to announce a partnership to make safe drinking water a reality for people
living in one of the poorest suburbs of Burkina Faso’s capital city,
Ouagadougou, and in two rural communities in southern Ethiopia.
In Burkina Faso, Coca-Cola and WaterAid are working with the local community and water utility to extend
existing water pipelines and install new water points that provide residents
with clean, treated drinking water. This will help residents reduce the risk of
contracting waterborne diseases that are highly prevalent in the area, such as
bacterial diarrhea, Hepatitis A and Typhoid fever. It will also reduce the
staggering amount of time that women and girls spend walking to get water each
day, and open the possibility for them to instead attend school, earn an
income, or care for their children and families.
Across the continent, Coca-Cola and WaterAid are helping provide safe drinking water, sanitation and
hygiene services to the Dita and Kemba Districts of the vast, impoverished
Gamo-Gofa zone in the southern part of Ethiopia. Water and sanitation-related
diseases are rampant in these two districts due to severe seasonal water
shortages, the absence of perennial rivers, little surface water and high soil
degradation. The Gamo-Gofa highlands, with rugged mountainous terrain, have
limited road networks, resulting in water supply coverage for these two
districts as low as 5 percent.
Our partnership with WaterAid supports
our Replenish Africa Initiative(RAIN) to bring safe water access to 6 million Africans by 2020.
WaterAid
also partners with Coca-Cola in Latin America and the FEMSA Foundation (a
Foundation funded by FEMSA – a Coca-Cola bottling partner), along with other
critical implementing partners, on Lazos
de Agua, or Water Links, a $12.3 million program to bring new and improved
WASH programs to more than 110,000 people in some of the poorest regions of
Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua over the next three years.
WaterAid is an international organization
working to transform lives by providing safe water access, hygiene and sanitation
to people without it in the developing world. They currently have programs in
some of the world’s poorest communities across 37 countries. Since its
inception, WaterAid has brought safe water access to 21 million people and sanitation
to 18 million people.
