Programs

CWDF is a Chinese registered, non-profit organization founded in 2000 and chartered in 2004 under the auspices of the All China Women's Federation which is a powerful, highly visible and well respected quasi-governmental body created at the ministry level in the late 1940's. CWDF is centralized with regional offices at the provincial and county and village levels responsible for project implementation. CWDF's mission is to address severe water shortage, improve quality of life and promote women's development by lessening the impact of drought in western and central China.

WATER CELLARS FOR MOTHERS (WCFM)

This project is entirely focused around increasing awareness and availability of safe and sustainable drinking water in poor rural villages in central and western China. WCFM is designed to build capacity using a watershed management solutions approach to expand CWDF's repertoire of rainwater harvesting techniques, and to ultimately help communities obtain water and teach them to improve the safety of this water through treatment.

Currently in Jianying Village in the Northwestern Gansu province, they are installing a rooftop harvesting model to help villages better collect rain water. Since rainfall is very scarce, this will improve the quality of the water collected even prior to filtration.

In subtropical Southwest Sichuan province's Huanying – a high mountainside village - a "town water system model" is being innovated and installed bringing water directly into over 600 homes from one mountain top source.

In order to educate and spread awareness among these communities, China Women's Development Foundation has distributed course books, 20 discs, 8,000 pamphlets of Drinking Water Hygiene in rural area in the project sites. The women's federations are working together to provide training for the local villages and the beneficiaries. These activities of training, education on health and sanitation have improved the health awareness of the beneficiary villagers and their sanitary habits. They have also built a good basis for improving their live qualities after solving the problem of drinking water.

WaterPartners is a highly respected 20-year-old U.S. non-profit with a mission to provide safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries. WaterPartners fills a key role in addressing the water crisis worldwide. As a matchmaker, WaterPartners connects donor dollars directly to capable community organizations in developing countries that otherwise are not able to source funding on their own and that don't have the kind of expert implementation, knowledge and technical experience that WaterPartners brings. Learn more at water.org.

WaterCredit: Catalyzing Access to Safe Water and Sanitation

Working together with Water Partners, PepsiCo Foundation commits to accelerating greater access to safe water and sanitation for those currently living without these basic necessities in India. This goal will be met through programs delivered via grants and WaterCredit, an innovative initiative that facilitates microcredit loans for water and sanitation.

Core elements of the program include delivery of safe water systems, access to improved sanitation, health and hygiene education, establishing a revolving loan fund of over $1MM for water and sanitation projects and facilitating the growth of a commercial market for microcredit loans for water and sanitation.

This project will directly impact a minimum of 120,000 lives; women and children comprise an estimated 68 percent of this total. Approximately 60,000 people will be served through traditional grants, while an additional 60,000 people will be served through WaterCredit. Due to the unique WaterCredit element of this initiative, PepsiCo Foundation anticipates that there will be a natural "multiplier effect" that will widen the impact of this commitment to a larger number of beneficiaries throughout the recipient communities.

The novel WaterCredit approach of blending microfinance with water and sanitation is not only new to the water sector, but also to PepsiCo Foundation's giving portfolio.

WaterCredit is much needed given the current water and sanitation situation in India. More than 120 million people lack access to safe water in India – a figure that is larger than the population of all but 10 countries worldwide. In addition, 800 million people in India do not have access to a hygienic toilet. The World Health Organization reports that, in low-income countries, unsafe water and sanitation are associated with three of the ten leading causes of death. At any given time, patients suffering from a water-related disease occupy half of the world's hospital beds.

Current methods of addressing this water and sanitation crisis are not scalable, as they rely on philanthropy alone.

This partnership will not only provide safe water for people living in India, but it will also create a sustainable and scalable model to accelerate access to safe water and sanitation for hundreds of millions of people throughout the developing world. This will be accomplished through our program, which offers both traditional grant and loan funds.

The Safe Water Network is a not-for-profit organization established to develop and deploy new, economically viable water purification technology to provide safe water to neglected populations – a critical global issue impacting more than 1 billion people. Safe Water Network is not affiliated with any governmental organization, and is governed by a Board of philanthropic and business leaders. Safe Water Network serves as a catalyst for the development, optimization and validation of demand-driven, sustainable, water solutions that have potential to meet the needs to the world's poor at scale.

Safe Water Network: Optimizing Safe Affordable Water Solutions
Through a three year partnership with Safe Water Network, PepsiCo Foundation has pledged to implement safe water initiatives for village water systems in Ghana, India, and Bangladesh as well as rainwater harvesting systems in India. These projects are projected to impact more than 200,000 people. Each project is being pursued through a "stage-gate" process in which pledged funding and resources are committed based on achieving project milestones each year.

Projects include:

• Launch village water systems in Ghana and expand to West Africa, providing access to safe water impacting ~70,000 people in three years.
• Provide community-level safe water solutions to populations in ~100 villages (~65,000 people) of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, India in three years.
• Support the development and launch of a micro-enterprise water kiosk model in rural Bangladesh, serving ~65,000 people in three years.
• Implement rainwater harvesting systems to meet the severe water needs of ~25,000 people in rural Rajasthan, India.

In 2008, The Earth Institute at Columbia University, one of the world's premier institutions dedicated to global sustainable development, and PepsiCo Foundation, entered into a $6 million three-year partnership.

The program includes a series of high-impact, community-based activities and practical solutions across water, agriculture and climate.

The initiative is focused on improving water access, increasing water productivity and identifying innovative methods to find "more crop per drop" in water-stressed areas of China, India, Brazil and Africa.

Together with NCLR in 2001, PepsiCo Foundation created the NCLR Escalera Project: Taking Steps to Success to stem the tide and close the gap of Latino high school drop out encouraging at-risk Latino high school students to graduate from high school, prepare for college, and explore career opportunities through internships.

The Foundation's original intent was to co-develop a best practice education program model which can be rolled out in all of NCLR's 300 nation-wide affiliates. This remains the goal today as the program continues to be expanded and replicated across the nation.