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USAID, P&G Highlight
Partnership for Safe Water
Washington DC, March 6, 2007 — Procter & Gamble (P&G)
and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) are highlighting
their partnership to provide safe drinking water at the household level
to millions of children in Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic
of Congo, and Rwanda.
While P&G
and USAID are key collaborators on this effort, it is comprised of
a network of partnerships focused on the provision of safe drinking
water. The main partner for social marketing is PSI.
“This is a significant step to making drinking water safe in Africa
and elsewhere for millions of people,” said Ambassador Randall L. Tobias,
Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and USAID Administrator. “This
unique effort demonstrates the power of partnership by leveraging the
skills and resources of Procter & Gamble and the U.S. government
to reduce diarrheal disease, responsible for the deaths of an estimated
4,000 children per day around the globe.”
This partnership focuses on provision of two proven, cost-effective
household level technologies to disinfect drinking water. WaterGuard is
a dilute bleach product developed by CDC and PAHO and PUR is
a powdered water treatment product developed by P&G and CDC.
These household level disinfection technologies have been shown to
reduce disease and death in numerous health intervention trials.
Currently PSI
has social marketing programs for PUR in eight countries, and WaterGuard,
with USAID support,
in 18 countries. More than 5 million sachets of PUR and 4 million
bottles of WaterGuard have already been provided
in Kenya,
Malawi, and Ethiopia.
The
technologies are now in the process of being scaled-up using social
marketing and other approaches to raise awareness and change behavior
in many African countries. They are also being used to provide safe
drinking water for emergency relief, including the recent floods in
Kenya and Ethiopia, and to help address cholera outbreaks in the Congo
and Malawi.
"We have provided more than 600 million liters of safe drinking
water over the last three years," said Charlotte Otto, Global
External Relations Officer at P&G. "Our efforts to date have
been a drop in the ocean compared to the vast need and this partnership
enables us to scale-up our efforts in order to make a much larger health
impact." Other partners include the CDC’s Global AIDS program, Rotary International
and local community-based women’s groups to provide the products to
people in the part of the Nyanza region in Kenya. P&G also provided
one million sachets of PUR in Kenya to people living with HIV/AIDs
through the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent
and Kenyan Red Cross.
In addition, P&G employees are volunteering
to provide safe drinking water training in schools. P&G is donating
PUR to orphanages through the International Council of Nurses and their
affiliates in Kenya and Malawi, working with YWCA to create a sustainable
local income generation project in Kenya, and collaborating with UNICEF,
CARE and the Global Water Challenge group to provide safe drinking
water in schools in Kenya.
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