Safe Water Now increases access to safe water by treating water with chlorine so that it's safe to drink
Over 2 billion people lack access to water that is safe to drink, and unsafe water is responsible for more than one million deaths each year. Unsafe drinking water is a leading risk factor for infectious diseases, exacerbates malnutrition, and is the most common cause of diarrhoea — the world’s second-leading cause of child mortality.
This is a particular problem in poor rural areas, where people rely on open springs and shallow wells that are easily contaminated by human and animal waste. But according to the World Health Organization, treating water with diluted chlorine is a safe and effective way to improve water quality.
Safe Water Now programming in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, and India uses innovative, low-cost approaches like chlorine dispensers and automatic in-line chlorination. With local government and community buy-in, the program reports reaching nearly 10 million people with safe water access and having saved the lives of more than 15,000 children under 5 years old. Now, Safe Water Now is scaling in partnership with the Government of India to reach tens of millions more.
For information about the cost-effectiveness of this intervention, see GiveWell’s 2022 grant report.
We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things: