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Our Story

We began by listening to women who carry water.

Water1st was founded on a simple realization: the people most affected by water scarcity already understood what needed to change.

Women and girls described carrying water as exhausting, time-consuming work — a daily burden that limited education, income, and opportunity. Their priority was clear: not a closer water point, but water at home.

Our work begins by listening to those experiences and designing solutions that end the walk for water.

For many years, water projects measured success by infrastructure built rather than service delivered. Systems often provided limited quantities of water or required continued hauling from public taps.

We learned that lasting change happens only when water is reliable, sufficient, and available at the household. This insight reshaped how we design every project.

How We Design Solutions

End the Walk for Water
Our primary objective is to end the walk for water for women and girls. Household water access transforms health, education, safety, and economic opportunity by freeing time and reducing physical burden.
Design for Household Service
We focus on piped water networks that deliver safe water directly to homes, available every day and in quantities that protect health. This approach aligns with global standards for safely managed water while going further to ensure water is truly usable in daily life.
Integrate Water, Toilets, and Hygiene
Clean water alone is not enough. Projects combine household water service, water-seal toilets, and hygiene education so families can prevent disease and improve well-being. Women’s leadership within community water boards strengthens long-term success and builds confidence that extends beyond water management.
Build to Objective Standards
Our projects follow rigorous engineering and management standards grounded in research and science. We prioritize reliable water sources, community-scale systems, and designs that communities can operate independently for generations.
Measure What Matters
We follow up long after construction to understand how systems perform in real life — how much water families use, whether repairs happen quickly, and whether funds are available for future maintenance. We also listen to users themselves, because dignity, privacy, and quality of life are essential measures of success.
Partner Locally
Our success depends on locally led partner organizations with deep experience and community trust. These partners lead implementation, mobilize communities, and ensure solutions reflect lived realities.
Collaborate as Equals
We strive to be true collaborators, where community priorities and local expertise guide decisions. Transparency about challenges and shared learning strengthens outcomes and builds lasting partnerships.

Because our approach prioritizes long-term service rather than short-term construction, projects consistently continue functioning years after completion. These outcomes reinforce a simple lesson: sustainable water access is not accidental — it is designed.

Water1st exists to help bring water home — transforming daily life for families and creating lasting change led by the people who live it every day.

Join us! Together we can change the world, one water project, one community at a time.

Our Story

Water1st was started in 2005 by a group of professionals with solid experience in the water and sanitation sector. Our focus was simple: build an organization from the ground up with the ability to consistently implement high-quality water and sanitation projects that provide permanent solutions for the worlds most vulnerable communities. Our comprehensive, cost-effective approach impacts the health, economy, education, food security, and overall well-being of our project communities. Addressing the water and sanitation needs of the world’s poorest people is the one activity that, when done properly, generates benefits that can lift a community out of extreme poverty.

Why did the world need a new water and sanitation organization? Because 35-50% of water projects fail in the first 5 years. This staggering statistic hasn’t changed for the past 30 years. Why? Because fundraising for new projects often takes priority over monitoring the old projects. This means that less than 10% of projects receive any monitoring once completed, and that organizations are not learning from past work to improve their outcomes. We knew it didn’t have to be that way – our experience proved that we had a method that could successfully provide a permanent solution.

Water1st was created to support water projects that would last. Our vision was to support local, on-the-ground organizations (our partners/colleagues in this work) who would organize and train community members to participate in every step of the process. And we would commit to consistent project funding as well as monitoring and evaluation. In a world that entices us with new technologies, new inventions, and new gadgets, we have remained steadfast to our effective mission. We have 5,004 independently operated projects to demonstrate that our approach works.

Today, our Water1st community is comprised of more than 8,000 supporters across the country, including a network over 300 youth advocates. Collectively, our extraordinary community is making a huge difference in the lives of vulnerable families.

Our Guiding Principles

We establish long-term partnerships with local, non-governmental agencies and we fund them consistently. Stable funding to our partners enables them to retain qualified staff who develop trusting relationships with local communities and leaders to engage in strategic planning. This approach also allows us to efficiently saturate a region with water and sanitation projects. Our local colleagues are key to our success.

We fund comprehensive, cost-effective projects which include piped water systems, sanitary toilets, and hygiene education. Every project serves a whole community; water is piped directly to individual homes, schools, health clinics, and community centers. Our partners train communities to operate and maintain their systems in perpetuity. Often this requires investing in projects that have higher up-front capital costs but that have proven more efficient and cost effective to operate over time. It also means that our partners don’t opt for new gadgets that haven’t been proven in the field and/or do not have supply chains for service or replacement parts.

We follow up. We routinely visit our projects to evaluate our work, to hold our partners accountable, and to exchange knowledge. We make sure each project is providing the intended benefits and generating the best possible outcomes. You can be confident that your donation is spent wisely and is making a real difference in the lives of the people we serve.

There is also a philosophical value that we hold up — we start from a place of respect for the people we assist. We believe people are their own best resource in escaping poverty and we support solutions based on their priorities. We listen, involve community members in every step of the process, and fund solutions that are most effective in the long run. Every vulnerable community is rich in human intellect and strength of spirit. We are successful because we invest in these resources and provide the poorest people in the world a path out of poverty.

On the fundraising side, we made a conscious decision to focus on grassroots funding. We remain committed to the solutions that best serve vulnerable communities rather than focusing on the priorities of donors. The stable funding provided by individual donors and foundations has proven to maximize the effectiveness of our international work. We believe the global water and sanitation crisis can be solved by building a community of concerned people who take simple and effective actions together.

Join us! Together we can change the world, one water project, one community at a time.
Our Vision
We envision a world where every household has running water and a toilet.
Our Mission
Water1st brings running water and toilets to every household, meeting universal health standards and changing the systems that require women and girls to carry water.