Friend – you still have time to double the impact of your donation to Safe Water Now.

Despite safe drinking water being recognized as a human right ~15 years ago, the UN describes access as “alarmingly off track" – and climate change is worsening the picture. In 2022, extreme weather events contributed to cholera outbreaks in 30 countries – 145% above the five-year average.

It costs just $1.50 to provide safe water access to one person for an entire year – combined with this $200k match, your donation will help unlock safe drinking water for an additional 266,000 people.

New blog on safe water innovation: the invention of the manual chlorinator

Earlier this year, our team reached out to Fred Jacob & Charles Taflin - inventors of manual chlorinator (a device used in our safe water program) - with a technical question. What we learned surprised us: Fred & Charles had no idea their invention had scaled globally.

Their story started with an ambitious goal: designing a low-cost, zero maintenance safe water solution for rural Nicaragua.

From designing in Charles’ (a retired superintendent of Minneapolis’s Water Works) garage, device testing with lent lab technicians in the Saint Paul water treatment plant basement, iterating for scalability, and open sourcing their design on the early internet - Fred & Charles were at the vanguard of driving evidence-based, open-sourced solutions.

Their design went through rigorous testing in Evidence Action’s Accelerator - besting five other devices, and now reaching over 172,000 people, with potential to reach millions more.

Read the full story of the manual chlorinators 30+ year journey charting a path to the first generation raised on clean water.