Welcome to a meeting place that offers a virtual exploration of the global water crisis. Through characters and places that represent a composite of real-world experiences on social networking sites like Second Life, you will be able to better understand the daily reality faced by more than a billion people who do not have access to safe water. You can also follow their stories through Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr and learn how you can team up with WaterPartners to help provide safe drinking water and sanitation to people in need.

	Dahney Dahney is an 11-year old girl from a tiny village in Ethiopia. For a long time, her family depended on a river three hours away for all their water needs. Times have changed, though, in so many ways. MySpace    Facebook    Flickr     YouTube
	Miguel Miguel, 16, is from a small farming community in Honduras. Though young, he's seen a lot of scary things, including a hurricane. But he's also seen real progress and hope for him and his family. MySpace    Facebook    Flickr     YouTube
	Araja This 22-year old native of India is a new mother. She wants a better, healthier life for her and her son. And with some help from WaterPartners, she now sees a path for this. MySpace    Facebook    Flickr     YouTube

About WaterPartners International

Our Vision

We envision the day when everyone in the world can take a safe drink of water.

Our Mission

WaterPartners International is challenging the traditional approach to assisting people in developing countries. Our goals are to draw attention to the world's number one health problem, unsafe and inadequate water supplies, and to raise funds to help fight this immense problem. To do this, we aim to inspire action:

Donors
To provide consistent financial resources with a sense of solidarity for those in need of safe water.
Staff and volunteers: To seek innovative and efficient solutions to meeting the global water supply needs of today and tomorrow.

People in need of safe water
To take the lead in meeting their own needs.

Together, these people form the "water partnership" that will allow us to realize our vision. We invite you to become one of them.

Develop high quality, sustainable water projects
We use our expertise to foster high-quality, sustainable, community-level water supply projects.  We promote innovative solutions that enable communities to take a leading role in solving their own water supply problems.

Enable donors to invest wisely
We exist to create a global awareness of the water supply crisis and to help people respond.  We carefully invest donors' funds in only the highest quality projects through locally-based water development organizations.  We hold ourselves accountable to donors and to the people who benefit from the projects they support.

Our History

WaterPartners was founded in 1990 because efforts to address the world water crisis were inadequate and inefficient. WaterPartners first water project was funded in that same year in El Limon, Honduras. WaterPartners was incorporated in 1993 by Gary White and Marla Smith-Nilson while they attended graduate school at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

WaterPartners expanded its work in Central America to Guatemala in 1994 and to El Salvador in 1996. In 2001, WaterPartners further expanded its work to the Philippines, India and Bangladesh. Next, WaterPartners expanded to the African countries of Ethiopia and Kenya in 2003 and 2005. WaterPartners opened a South Asia office in India in 2005 and an East Africa office in Kenya in 2006.WaterPartners Success Stories.