Saving Lives with Safe Water
For the past six years, we've regularly donated a proportion of our profits to Frank Water. Every November this ramps up as the charity becomes the focus of our Black Friday campaign. With your help we’ve so far managed to raise more than £21,000 for Frank Water. This has been enough to provide safe water, for life, to 1750 people.
Our relationship with Bristol-based charity Frank Water began when we met their Founder Katie Alcott who visited our lifestyle store in Totnes, Devon. We connected with Katie over a shared love of India, which is where many of our artisans and makers are based. Frequent visits to our suppliers have exposed us to not only the wonder and vitality of this beautiful country, but also to the hardships, inequality and poverty many people living there face, particularly in terms of access to clean water.
Katie started the charity after her own experience of visiting India. Whilst on a gap year, Katie stayed with a local family in Kashmir and suffered from dysentery due to unsafe drinking water. After a gruelling five years of battling with her condition, Katie recovered and has since been passionate about bringing safe drinking water not only to the family she’d lived with, but to many others throughout India and Nepal. Frank Water was born with the aim to help improve the living standards of the poorest communities by going into areas that are often too remote for larger charities and establishing clean water systems. As soon as we heard about the fantastic work Katie and others at Frank Water were doing, we knew we had to support them.
It's incredible what Frank Water have managed to achieve since it began in 2005. In that time, they've successfully brought safe water to over 425,000 people in 617 communities in India and Nepal. This past year, they’ve provided a safe and reliable water supply to more than 1500 people in India’s Andhra Pradesh. Elsewhere in India, they’ve kept families safe from fluorosis, which is a debilitating disease caused by naturally occurring fluoride that leaches into drinking water. Thanks to Frank Water, 800 more school children now have access to facilities to regularly wash their hands, which has helped prevent the spread of diseases, and they've used their projects as models of best practice to leverage £300,000 from the Indian government to pay for further infrastructure. In Nepal, they’ve provided training around hygiene and sanitation to more than 1400 people and ensured nearly 200 households have access to safe water.
The Frank Water team told us that none of this would have been possible without support from donations such as the ones we make at Nkuku, which in turn we are only able to give thanks to your help; through you shopping with us throughout the year and particularly during Black Friday.
What Frank Water have accomplished so far is amazing, however, their work is far from over. Across the world, 1 in 10 people still live without safe water and 2.5 billion people (that's 1 in 3) have no access to adequate sanitation. The climate-change crisis presents an enormous problem as it affects people through water, whether too much or too little, and unfairly affects the world's poorest people most. Frank Water is continuing to work to build a water-secure future for the communities that are most at risk. They are doing this through mapping out available water resources and putting in place measures such as ponds to capture rainwater, dams to prevent run-off and tree planting to improve soil structure and conserve groundwater. In this way, they're helping people adapt and protect themselves against the impact of the climate crisis.
We are proud to continue to support Frank Water in their mission. To find out more about their work and make a personal donation visit Frank Water.
