It’s Shop & Share month! For every order over £50 that’s placed during November, we’ll donate £5 to one of our two chosen charities. One of these charities is Bristol-based Frank Water, a small organisation that’s working to address a big problem.
Who is Frank Water?
Frank Water is a safe water and sanitation charity that’s aiming to bring safe drinking water to the 663 million people worldwide who, shockingly, still don’t have access to it. Founded by social entrepreneur Katie Alcott back in 2005, the charity has so far provided clean drinking water and sanitation to nearly 386,500 people in 442 communities across India and Nepal.
Katie set up the charity after she contracted dysentery from drinking dirty water. She felt that access to safe drinking water should be a basic human right. Despite the Millennium Development Goals efforts to halve the number of people without access to safe water and sanitation over 15 years, one in ten people are still without access. Frank Water believes no one should be left behind. The team focuses on communities cut off from society by geography, poverty or caste.
Frank Water’s Programmes
The charity works on a number of programmes depending on a number of factors, all with one aim; to provide access to clean drinking water and sanitation in villages throughout India and Nepal. For some communities, the team implement gravity fed systems to allow water to run down from a source at the top of the hill into the village for storage and use. For another, their need may be for a rainwater harvesting unit to capture and filter rainfall for household use.
Another element of Frank Water’s work is educating members of the local community. It’s important to arm them with the knowledge and skills they need to understand their rights. This education allows them to take ownership of their community, health and development. This can be through equipping local people with the skills and knowledge to apply for government funding. Or, using local tradespeople to install things like taps and toilets in the community, using the funds raised by Frank Water. A lot of work also goes in to establishing the role of women, the elderly and disabled in communities – groups often marginalised due to their age, gender or health.
This is a charity we’ve recently connected with to work together as their values resonate with us. Through our support of Indiability Foundation, we see great synergies with the IMAGE programme. These are links we are helping to forge between the two groups. Furthermore, as an added bonus, Frank Water is based in the beautiful South West just like us at Myakka!
Shop & Share Month
Don’t forget that for every order over £50 placed this November, we’ll donate £5 that’ll be shared equally between Frank Water and our other chosen charity, Indiability Foundation. You can find out more about Indiability by clicking here.
And finally, explore Shop & Share month on our website.
