W.A.T.E.R.
212 Xanadu Road , #507
Wisconsin Dells, WI 53965
Phone: 608-253-0717
501C-3 Not for Profit
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About Us |
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Who We Are
Water In Africa Through Everyday Responsiveness was founded by a consultant of the Carter Center who worked with the Guinea Worm Eradication program. Jim Niquette has worked in Sudan, Nigeria and Ghana with the Carter Center since June, 2002, and continues to work in Africa in hopes of eradicating the disease. Other Africa ground based resources exist in the form of people in these countries, mostly who have been involved in the Guinea Worm eradication effort over the past 10-15 years.
Because the Guinea Worm Eradication program is a health program, and providing water is expensive, money is not always available to address the root problem of providing clean water in the villages. W.A.T.E.R. was set up to address this, so that the people working on Guinea Worm eradication had money to put in hand-pumps or repair broken systems, while at the same time doing the health related work.
W.AT.E.R. has almost no overhead, has no formal office, no marketing budget and no big name. The Web site you are looking at is the primary mechanism by which money is raised. What we do, is take the donations we get and use them directly in these most rural villages in Africa.
How we operate
The major problem with most projects in rural Africa can be summed up in one word. "Implementation”. There is an old saying; “The difference between vision and hallucination is implementation”. This must have been originally stated with Africa in mind. Many African projects fail because of the day to day problems associated with implementing them. If you do not think this is true, you might ask yourself why Polio is not eradicated with a vaccine proven in 1955, or water is not in every village using hand-pumps, a technology which has been available for longer than that. The simple answer is it is just too difficult for NGO’s, aid agencies and even their own governments to implement projects in these areas. W.A.T.E.R. focuses on implementing the limited number of projects we do successfully. This is accomplished by having a person on the ground for the duration of the project. In most cases this person is a Guinea Worm Consultant or other field based person, who will operate in an area for several months to work on Guinea Worm (during an endemic period). That person will at the same time implement water projects.
Where we operate
W.A.T.E.R is currently operating in Ghana and Nigeria. Ghana was the number one Guinea Worm endemic country in the world in 2004. It is anticipated that most of the work in the coming years will be in these two countries.
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