USAID, Procter & Gamble Highlight Partnership for Safe Drinking Water in Africa

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and consumer products conglomerate Procter and Gamble 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.

"This partnership is a significant step to provide safe drinking water in Africa and elsewhere for millions of people," says Kent Hill, assistant administrator of USAID for global health. "This unique effort demonstrates the power ofpartnership 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 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), andPUR Purifier of Water is a powdered water treatment product developed by Procter & Gamble and CDC. These disinfection technologies have been shown to reduce disease and death in numerous health intervention trials.The technologies are now in the process of being promoted using social marketing and other approaches to raise awareness and change behavior in many African countries, the partner organizations say. They are also being used to provide safe drinkingwater 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," says 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."

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