Working with WaterAid Toward SDG 6 in Colombia

Since 2013 ClearBridge has partnered with WaterAid to help address water challenges around the world: globally, one in 10 people don’t have clean water close to home; more than one in five don’t have a decent toilet of their own; two in five households don’t have adequate handwashing facilities.

WaterAid is an international nonprofit organization seeking to address these issues by making clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene a reality for everyone, everywhere within a generation. WaterAid works with governments and the private sector in more than 34 countries to change the lives of the poorest and most marginalized people. Since 1981, it has helped provide over 28 million people with clean water and access to good hygiene through a deep understanding of the issues that face communities living without these basic services and of the solutions needed.

ClearBridge’s partnership with WaterAid brings together several important components of our corporate mission: philanthropy, volunteerism, sustainability and relating our investment capabilities to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, in this case SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. Since good hygiene promotion is one of the most effective ways to improve global health, improving access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene also contributes to SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being.

In 2013 ClearBridge in Australia began to work with WaterAid to fund sustainable infrastructure projects in Timor-Leste, one of the world’s least developed countries. This partnership, now in its ninth year, has provided safe water and sanitation systems, as well as hygiene and gender education to over 1,500 men, women and children living in the mountainous rural district of Liquica. In

2021, our projects focused on providing sanitation facilities to schools and community centers. Insufficient sanitation facilities are a leading cause of diarrhoeal disease — the second-biggest killer of children under the age of five. Adequate sanitation in schools has increased attendance, most notably for girls, who now have access to toilet facilities that provide them with privacy and dignity, and created greater gender inclusion.

Since 2020, ClearBridge has been helping underwrite a critical project to bring water to La Guajira, a mostly arid desert peninsula in northern Colombia and home to various indigenous and afrodescendant communities, in a safe and consistent manner. With the support of ClearBridge, WaterAid is working in the Tomarrazón community, home to 1,960 people in the rural southern part of Riohacha Municipality, to deliver life-saving water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programming.

ClearBridge and WaterAid made significant strides in 2021 in a school in Tomarrazón, where we aim to provide safe water, toilets and hygiene to 600 middle and high school students and 57 teachers. The project involves building elevated water tanks to improve access to clean water and rehabilitating five toilet blocks (two for boys, two for girls, one for teachers). Each toilet block includes handwashing facilities. In February 2022, at roughly the six-month mark, we reached approximately 60% of project targets. WaterAid has also begun training sessions at the school to teach better hygiene and wastewater management practices, along with how to manage the school’s new water infrastructure. Sessions use WaterAid’s WASH Parcheesi board game with students and will continue after the WASH infrastructure work finishes.

As WaterAid works to build Tomarrazón’s ability to operate and maintain its several WASH services for the long term, we look forward to reporting progress in the years to come.